Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

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Friday, June 12, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. But after all is said and done, the others are right.” Though Bernstein thrived on the collaborative theatrical process at that time in his life (West Side Story appeared three years later), he never returned to the film studio. On the Waterfront was his only movie score. On the Waterfront, the story of Terry, a longshoreman (played by Brando) who defies the racketeers who had previously controlled him, enjoyed enormous success when it was released, earning seven Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Eva Marie Saint) and Best Director (Elia Kazan). Bernstein, however, was not content to have his music (which he insisted “had been planned as a composition with a beginning, middle and end”) remain in the background, and in 1955 he extracted from it a Symphonic Suite for large orchestra based on the half-dozen thematic ideas from which he wove the tightly integrated movie score. A broad horn melody (used in the film for the main title) opens the Suite, and recurs several times as a connective device. The following sections of the Suite, played without pause, are a powerful Presto barbaro led by the percussion (heard in the film to anticipate or heighten the scenes of violence); a warmly lyrical melody introduced by the solo flute (associated with the girl whose love is largely responsible for converting Terry to the forces of good); and a ferocious Allegro non troppo (which accompanies the fight scene between Terry and the racketeer, Johnny Friendly). The opening horn theme returns in a transfigured setting to close both the Suite and the movie, where it underlines Terry’s heroic walk to victory. The last measures, however, are marked by discordant cries from the full orchestra that recall the bitterness and suffering which characterize the story and preclude the conventional happy ending. The Song of the Forests, Op. 81 (1949) Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, nine trumpets, nine trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings. The performance time is 37 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra. Much of the cultural and political history of Soviet Russia can be read from the events and creations of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life. His music of the 1920s — the impudent First Symphony, the satiric opera The Nose, the jingoistic Second and Third Symphonies — reflects the youthful exuberance and artistic avant-gardism of the first decade of the Soviet regime. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin emerged victorious from the scramble for political power, and he solidified his dictatorship with the purges of the 1930s. Art and music did not escape Stalin’s repressions, and the vigorous, experimental styles of the preceding decade were attacked as “bourgeois decadence” and “formalistic.” Outright condemnation came upon Shostakovich in early 1936, when his lurid modernist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had been performed successfully dozens of times in Leningrad and Moscow following its premiere in 1934, incited Stalin’s vitriol. Stalin stormed out of a performance in Moscow, and within days an article in the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Pravda, perhaps written by Stalin himself, denigrated the opera as “Chaos Instead of Music.” Shostakovich, reeling from the blow, withdrew Lady Macbeth and his Fourth Symphony, already in rehearsal, and produced the Fifth Symphony in 1937 as “an artist’s response to just criticism.” Welcomed back into the fold of repentant artists, Shostakovich became the leading Soviet composer during World War II. His Seventh Symphony, which recorded the misery and hopedfor triumph of the Russians in Leningrad under the ghastly Nazi siege, was a symbol of Russian courage and heroism to those at home and abroad, and it gained a Stalin Prize for the composer in 1942. The brooding Eighth Symphony (1943) and the sardonic Ninth (1945) met with less official approval, however, largely because they eschewed blatant patriotism at the time of the defeat of Germany. Again, in 1948, Shostakovich’s music was denounced, this time as “neo-classic” and “an escape from reality.” (The Soviet bureaucracy never gave clear definitions for any of these censorious terms.) Rather than a specifically artistic reason behind this condemnation, which also included Program Notes A23
GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Friday, June 12, 2009 Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian and other leading Soviet composers, it seems to have arisen from Stalin’s consolidation of power after the war. (In his purported memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich claimed that Stalin was jealous of the international acclaim the “Leningrad” Symphony had brought to the composer, and these purges were the dictator’s way of punishing the composer’s celebrity.) Other than the deeply expressive (but musically abstract) 24 Preludes and Fugues of 1950-1951, Shostakovich, motivated both by a sense of protest and by fear for his family, made public no music between 1948 and Stalin’s death in 1953 other than film scores dealing with episodes in Soviet history (Encounter at the Elbe, The Fall of Berlin, The Memorable Year 1919) and a series of Party-glorifying works for chorus and orchestra: Poem of the Motherland, The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland, March of the Defenders of Peace, Our Song and The Song of the Forests. The Song of the Forests was one of some 220 new musical works created during 1949 to promote Soviet ideals and gratify Stalin’s ego. The text, by the conformist poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, is a paean to the government program intended to re-forest the vast swathes of the country devastated during the war — the wary poet made sure to include references to Stalin as “the great gardener,” but those were excised after the dictator’s death. (Shostakovich set other of Dolmatovsky’s verses, including a song [Op. 86, No. 1] that was used as a theme for Soviet news broadcasts and was sung by Yury Gagarin during the first manned space flight in 1961.) Shostakovich armored the text with a musical battalion comprising large orchestra, mixed chorus, children’s chorus and two male soloists, and The Song of the Forests excited such official acclaim at its premiere (December 15, 1949, Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting) that it received a Stalin Prize, a headspinning turn of fortune for a composer whose work had been publicly condemned less than two years before. Though it stabilized his situation at home, The Song of the Forests dulled Shostakovich’s reputation abroad (a critic noted in a report of the work for Time magazine that Shostakovich had “once showed signs of becoming a great composer”) and apparently left him resigned but ambivalent about his place in the Soviet cultural machine (“I take responsibility for the music, but as for the words …”). The Song of the Forests, which channels the revered idioms of Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky- Korsakov as much as Shostakovich’s own distinctive musical speech, comprises seven full-throated movements that encompass several traditional stylistic types: hymn (When the War Was Over), scherzo (The Call Rings Throughout the Land), lament (Memory of the Past), intermezzo (The Pioneers Plant the Forest), march (The Young Communists Forge Onwards), meditation (A Walk Into the Future), apotheosis (Glory). It is built with consummate craftsmanship, and makes an absolutely splendid showcase for the chorus, but such elements as the conventionality of style, the breathless, superheated march strains of The Young Communists Forge Onwards, or the pile-on sonic slabs of the finale might cause some listeners to question the work’s emotional sincerity. It is not impossible that Shostakovich found in The Song of the Forests an ironic medium of protest through the very banality forced upon his music during the darkest days of Stalinist Russia. ©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda A24 Program Notes
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Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

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