November–December 2012 - Baltimore magazine

{ Program notes
Christopher Rouse has become a creative
voice that Baltimore audience members
know well. Or at least we think we do,
because Rouse has continually shown a great
capacity to grow, change, and surprise us
with his music.
Early in his career, he was renowned for
writing very fast, intricate, dissonant, and
often extremely loud music, such as The
Infernal Machine and Gorgon—in what he
called his “wild style.” With his Symphony
No. 1, commissioned by the BSO, there
was a shift to much slower and more serious
music. For a time, Rouse’s dark, anguished
works made him the contemporary singer of
the tragedy of human existence. However,
more recent works, such as his Concerto for
Orchestra (performed here in 2008) and Rapture
(2002), have revealed a more positive,
even joyful orientation and a less complicated
focus on showing off the sheer beauty
and virtuosity of contemporary orchestral
sound—a tendency to look “towards the
light,” as Rouse calls it. What ties all these
different styles together is what Rouse terms
his “expressive urgency. I have to shout; I
have to whisper. I want to write music that
insists on being listened to.”
His Symphony No. 3 seems to draw on
elements both of his brighter, more virtuosic
approach and his early fast and violent style.
A joint commission from four orchestras on
three continents—the Saint Louis Symphony,
the Singapore Symphony, the Royal
Stockholm Philharmonic, and the BSO—it
received its world premiere by the SLSO
under its music director David Robertson on
May 5, 2011 and has its East Coast premiere
at these concerts. In an interview in the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, Robertson commented
on the extreme variety of expression to be
found in this work: “He amazes with his
unique blend of incredible force and flowerpetal-like
delicacy …[The Symphony] has
moments of subtle poetry and places where
the orchestra becomes incandescent.”
Rouse reports that each of his three
symphonies has been “an homage to a composer.
The First Symphony was an homage
to Bruckner, the Second to [the German
20 th -century composer] Karl Amadeus
Hartmann, and the Third to Prokofiev.”
Though all its music, “with a couple of
tips of the cap to Prokofiev,” is Rouse’s own,
the formal plan and emotional trajectory of
this Symphony is based on Prokofiev’s littleperformed
Second Symphony, which in
turn was inspired by Beethoven’s formidable
last piano sonata, opus 111.
16 Overture | WWW.bSomuSIc.org
The composer explains the Prokofiev
connection further in his own note:
“Over the years I’ve often toyed with the
concept of ‘rewriting’ a piece composed by
someone else. By this, I do not mean ‘correcting’
or ‘improving’ it; rather, my idea has
been to take some central aspect of an already
composed work and consider it anew.
“The unusual form of
Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 2
furnished the old bottle
into which I have tried to
pour new wine.”
“My Third Symphony is an attempt to
do just this. The unusual form of Prokofiev’s
Symphony No. 2 furnished the old
bottle into which I have tried to pour new
wine. Among Prokofiev’s symphonies, this
one is, I believe, of especially high caliber,
though it is rarely programmed. He called
it his ‘symphony of iron and steel,’ and it is
unquestionably one of his more aggressive
and uncompromising scores. Cast in two
movements—an opening toccata-like Allegro
followed by a set of variations—Prokofiev’s
architecture was in turn influenced by that
of Beethoven in his final piano sonata. I
thus took this structure as my own and tried
to maintain Prokofiev’s own proportions
between the two movements.
“There is little in the way of actual quotation
from Prokofiev’s symphony. However,
Prokofiev’s opening repeated-note trumpet
blasts also begin my symphony, though
Prokofiev’s D has been replaced by an F
[the Symphony’s tonal center]. There is also
a direct quote at the end of my first movement:
The solo percussion passage at the
end of Prokofiev’s first movement has been
transferred here by way of homage. As in
the Russian master’s score, the music of this
movement is often savage and aggressive.
“The second movement of Beethoven’s sonata
consists of a theme with four variations
and the equivalent movement in Prokofiev’s
symphony is of a theme with six variations.
I decided to split the difference and commit
to a theme-with-five-variations form. The
variations are of notably disparate character,
and the musical language ranges from
the dissonant and barbaric to the overtly
tonal. After the statement of the theme [by
the English horn], the bright and glittering
first variation gives way to a highly
romantic variation scored for strings and
harp only. The third variation is moderate
in tempo and mood, but the short
fourth is a mostly quiet whirlwind in an
extremely fast tempo. The final variation,
which follows without pause, possesses a
bacchanalian abandon. A final reprise of
the theme, again a reference to Prokofiev’s
form, brings the symphony to a close.
“The work was completed in Baltimore on
February 3, 2011. It is dedicated to my highschool
music teacher, John Merrill; without
his kindness and encouragement, I might
never have found the fortitude to persevere in
my dream of becoming a composer.”
Born and raised in Baltimore, Christopher
Rouse has now returned to live here again.
He is a graduate of the Gilman School and
Oberlin College and holds a doctorate from
Cornell University. His numerous awards
and honors have included the 1993 Pulitzer
Prize for Music, the 2002 Grammy Award
for Best Contemporary Composition, and
being named as Musical America’s Composer
of the Year in 2009. In addition to his
extraordinarily busy composing career, he
is currently a professor at New York City’s
Juilliard School and this season begins a twoyear
appointment as composer-in-residence
with the New York Philharmonic.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes,
english horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two
bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets,
four trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
two harps and strings.
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor
ludwig van Beethoven
For many generations, Beethoven’s Fifth has
defined the symphonic experience in the
popular imagination, just as Hamlet stands
for classical drama and Swan Lake for the
ballet. It established the dramatic scenario of
the symphony as a heroic progression from
tragedy to triumph—and musically here
from the minor mode to the major—that
was imitated by countless later composers
from Brahms to Shostakovich. Moreover,
it wages its epic battle with a breathtaking
swiftness—less than 30 minutes in many
performances—and a concentrated power its
imitators could not match.
Europe was a troubled place when
Beethoven wrote this work between 1806