October 21 Program Notes
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Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A minor, Op. 37, "Gretry"

To give only the briefest hint of Henri Vieuxtemps' facility as violinist, one may first turn to Robert Schumann, who said of him, "When we speak of Vieuxtemps, we are apt to think of Paganini," and next to Hector Berlioz who, in a review of a Vieuxtemps performance in 1851 remarked, "There are some talents that disarm envy."

As virtuoso, composer, interpreter, and teacher, Vieuxtemps was one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of his day: a violinist who led the post-Paganini age, and a composer whose works remain fixed in the violin canon.

Born in 1820, in Verviers, Netherlands, Vieuxtemps was a child prodigy. He received his first lessons from his father, an amateur violin maker, and gave his first public recital at age six. The recital, which featured a concerto by Rode, won this comment from the critic Fetis: "Yesterday, we heard a violinist who was scarcely taller than his bow. His assurance, aplomb, and precision are truly remarkable for his age. He is a born musician."

Formal study began in Brussels, with Charles de Beriot, a Paganini rival who was deeply Immersed in the Franco-Belgian violin school. This was followed by compositional study with Simon Schecter in Vienna. Schecter, incidentally, was the teacher Schubert was planning to study with at the time of his death.

By 1833, Vieuxtemps had settled in Vienna, making acquaintance with many musicians who had known and performed with Beethoven, The following year, in fact, he performed Beethoven's violin concerto for the Viennese, to great acclaim. This is all the more remarkable, considering the criticism Paganini endured when playing works not of his own composition.

Vieuxtemps toured incessantly, making three stops in America, and taking a position as court violinist and soloist in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1846. After his Russian sojourn, he settled in Dreieichenain, Germany, and it was here, in 1858, that he began work on his fifth violin concerto, easily his most performed work. The concerto was written at the request of Hubert Leonard, a professor at Brussels Conservatory, as a competition piece.

Vieuxtemps' self-stated compositional goal was to "combine the pure form of the Viotti concerto with the technical demands of modern times," and this concerto fulfills his criterion admirably. In its day, it rejuvenated the French violin concerto by using the orchestra in a much more symphonic manner, and it established a harmonic vocabulary that one finds echoed in violin concerti throughout the 19th century. Long considered an important enhancement of the solo repertoire, it found one of its greatest champions in Jascha Heifetz.

Daring, poetic, demanding lightning speed and a capacity for melodic expressiveness, the work balances soloist and orchestra in dramatic and thrilling dialogue. Written in one continuous movement-a break from established tradition-the concerto begins with introductory matter from the orchestra, building gradually to the quiet solo entry. Soon, we are in the midst of running arpeggios, double-stops, harmonics: an encyclopedia of violin technique, yet still in service to the work itself. Following an adagio of notable pathos, we are once again thrust into brilliant, rapid-fire passage-work, concluding with a flourish. While offering a wide range of emotional content, the entire concerto can be performed, with no loss to the intrinsic musical sense, in as few as 19 minutes.

In 1873, Vieuxtemps suffered a stroke, which made further public performances impossible. He moved to Algiers to be with family, and continued his compositional efforts: the sixth and seventh concertos were written at this time. He died in Algiers in 1881, and was returned to Brussels, to be buried in his hometown.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43

In 1935, Dmitri Shostakovich was at the peak of his early career. He had published three well-received symphonies, as well the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and was lionized as one of Russia's leading young composers.

His good reputation earned him a spot as part of a Soviet delegation that toured Turkey in September of that year. While on the tour, he began work on his fourth symphony, and he returned from the tour with a full slate of concert appearances scheduled at what he called "very favorable terms."

The symphony was nearing completion on January 28, 1936. On that day, while waiting at a train station, the composer saw an early edition of Pravda. One of the articles carried the headline, "Muddle Not Music," and the article was to have a profoundly disturbing effect on the rest of the composer's life.

It was a virulent attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, suggesting that, unless the composer changed his "degenerate" ways, things "could end very badly." Shostakovich had been publicly accused of the artistic sin of Formalism: writing music deemed contrary to Soviet interests and the interests of the international proletariat.

Socialist Realism dominated Russia's artistic life at the time, demanding, (according to the Composer's Union) "an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art."

Gossip suggested that Josef Stalin himself had authored "Muddle Not Music," but whether he had or hadn't, the message was equally clear: Shostakovich was now an official outcast. For many, including some of Shostakovich's close friends, such public opprobrium had proved to be a death sentence.

Shostakovich found himself shunned, his works were pulled from the repertoire, and he was called before the Composer's Union to be harshly rebuked. In addition, the conductor of Lady Macbeth was officially reprimanded, as was a reporter who made the mistake of giving the opera a good review. (Who says being a music critic isn't a dangerous job?) Shostakovich said nothing in his defense before the Composer's Union, apologized for his Formalist tendencies, and returned to his home, expecting to be arrested and "unpeopled" at any moment.

In this state of mind, he tried to resume work on the fourth symphony.

By mid-April of that year, the score was complete and a month later it had been orchestrated. Shostakovich was suicidal by then. In Testimony, his controversial memoirs, he recounts, "The danger horrified me, and I saw no other way out...I desperately wanted to vanish. It was the only way out. I thought of the possibility with relish."

Inexplicably, the fourth symphony was accepted for rehearsal by the Leningrad Philharmonic. Speculation is that Stalin allowed rehearsal of the work to see what the composer would do next.

What had Shostakovich accomplished in the fourth symphony? In the eyes of at least one astute commentator, he had achieved something remarkable. Otto Klemperer, touring Russia in May, 1936, dropped in to visit the composer, who played the score for him. Klemperer was so moved that he begged for the chance to perform the work the next season.

The symphony was not a shining tribute to the glories of Soviet Russia, however. The bulk of the writing had been done before the composer's fall from grace, and if Stalin was expecting something placatory, the extremities of the fourth would have acted like the proverbial red flag before the bull.

Rehearsals began, with the composer acutely aware that his life depended upon a positive reception of the work. And he had much to live for; his daughter, Galina, had been born a week after the work was finished.

According to some contemporaneous accounts, the conductor, Stiedry, was thoroughly unequipped to conduct the work, and terrified to be championing something written by an enemy of the people.

There was also the well-being of the musicians to consider. As Venyamin Bassner, a friend of the composer's recalls, "It was insinuated that all the performers would live to regret the day if the performance of the symphony went ahead." These elements, combined with Shostakovich's growing anxiety concerning his personal safety, proved to be insurmountable obstacles. The work was publicly proclaimed a failure by the composer, and withdrawn before a public performance.

He placed the composition in a drawer, where he imagined it would remain forever. Following the fourth's debacle, he began work on his next symphony, with its famous description "A Soviet artist's response to justified criticism." This work put him on the road to rehabilitation, and by the time Nikita Khruschev came to power, the composer was in enough favor that he was invited to prepare the fourth symphony for performance.

The original score had been lost during the war years, and if this story has a hero besides the composer, it is Boris Shalman, the librarian for the Leningrad Philharmonic. He had kept the orchestral parts from the original rehearsals in 1936, and now reconstructed the score note-for-note. In 1961 Shostakovich handed the score to conductor Kiril Kondrashin with these words: "Let them eat it." December 20, 1961, 25 years after the work was finished, it received its premiere by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

What was it that the audience heard? This is some of the most, if not the most, extreme music Shostakovich wrote. It is a titanic work of relentless exaggeration, frightening in intensity and volume, a work of physical assault that features some of the loudest music ever written.

The size of the orchestra is Mahleresque, with quadruple woodwinds, and a recommendation for up to 84 string players.

In terms of its structure, it acts as a reconciliation of Shostakovich's unique musical language, tied, however loosely, to traditional symphonic structure in three movements: an opening movement in a sonata form (albeit crushed nearly beyond recognition), followed by a scherzo, then a finale marked Largo-Allegro.

Throughout, the work is characterized by subversion of symphonic models. This is not a mathematical unfolding of theme and countertheme, but a collection of discontinuities, abrupt shifts in texture and pace, phrases that remain unfinished or off-balance, keys that fail to authoritatively resolve.

The first movement opens with a succession of woodwind figures, before crashing into a fortissimo of startling brutality. Dance figures emerge throughout, moments of ironic humor, with thundering, ferocious percussion to follow.

The ländler-like second movement begins with violins in tremolo. The movement is in a-b-a-b-a form, all conducted in a spirit of mockery, and near visionary satire.

The finale is not a heroic march to a thunderous resolution, but a glimpse at chaos, building to a rolling four-chord sequence marked "fffff," before snuffing itself out.

Shostakovich alludes to a programmatic intent in the work. In Testimony, he states, "The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven't forgotten the terrible pre-war years. That is what all my symphonies, starting with the fourth, are about."

Ian McDonald takes this starting point and makes a case that the fourth symphony is an overstated comment on overstatement, a reaction to the Stalin cult that sought grandiosity for its own sake. For McDonald, the symphony is "saturated in the megalomania of its time." This is the world of show trials, of "overfilled" production quotas, of massive projects, of the "fantastic lie." If it is, in fact, "a musical mirror to the excesses of the Stalin personality cult," it is, in some ironic way, our good fortune that Shostakovich pulled the work from performance 65 years ago.