ALSOP CONDUCTS BRAHMS 3
a specific set of ideals— it was to be tuneful, upbeat, able to tell a compelling( and often politically driven) story, and accessible to a broad audience. The Violin Concerto and most of Khachaturian’ s other repertoire generally met those criteria, although he was temporarily blacklisted for several years in the late 1940s when his music was declared“ anti-people.” Despite this setback, Khachaturian garnered international acclaim for his unique compositional style that incorporated the distinctive sounds of Armenian traditional folk music.
The Violin Concerto was one of Khachaturian’ s first pieces to be popular outside the Soviet Union, in part because of the influential recordings of the piece by its dedicatee, the violin virtuoso David Oistrakh. A professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Oistrakh premiered the concerto in November 1940 with the USSR State Symphony at a festival celebrating Soviet Music. His recordings introduced Khachaturian’ s Violin Concerto to global audiences and helped solidify the work’ s place in the canon.
Khachaturian’ s earliest musical memories include hearing folk music in Tbilisi and listening to his mother sing Armenian songs at home. Although the Violin Concerto does not contain any direct quotations of folk songs, the themes in each movement are reminiscent of Eastern European folk music. The first movement contains two main themes: the first is jaunty, rollicking, and dance-like, while the second is passionate and lyrical. After the exposition of these themes, the melodies are fragmented, decorated, and intensified in a dramatic development section before they are eventually restated in the recapitulation at the end of the movement. The second movement opens with a fleeting tune passed between the low instruments. The solo violinist then plays a series of wandering melodies similar to those sung by ashugs, Armenian folk musicians who improvise variations in an ever-evolving pattern. The third movement is full of virtuosic fireworks and driving rhythms, evoking the style of an exuberant country dance.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, suspended cymbal, tambourine, snare drum, harp, and strings, in addition to the solo violin.
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897, in Vienna, Austria
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN F MAJOR, OP. 90 [ 1883 ]
German composer Johannes Brahms waited until late in his career to take up composing symphonies, believing the genre required a mature perspective. His first two symphonies were completed within a year of each other in the late 1870s, and then he honed his craft for nearly six years before writing the Third Symphony in 1883. Eduard Hanslick, a music critic and contemporary of Brahms, wrote that“ Many music lovers will prefer the titanic force of Brahms’ s First Symphony; others, the untroubled charm of his Second, but the Third strikes me as being artistically the most nearly perfect.” The composer Antonín Dvořák expressed similar sentiments after hearing Brahms play a piano reduction of the symphony shortly before its public premiere, writing“ I say without exaggerating that this work surpasses his first two symphonies; if not, perhaps, in grandeur and powerful conception, then certainly in beauty.” Hans Richter conducted the premiere in Vienna, after which he dubbed the symphony“ Brahms’ s Eroica,” putting the work on the same level as Ludwig van Beethoven’ s“ Eroica” Symphony.
The Third Symphony was incredibly well-received at its premiere, even though rival factions in what is now called“ The War of the Romantics” nearly caused a scene during the concert. Brahms conceived of himself as a staunchly conservative composer, adhering to the earlier compositional ideals codified by Beethoven and Robert Schumann. His opponents, including Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, favored more progressive musical trends. Supporters of this“ New German” musical ideology were angered that a conservative composer like Brahms could be so successful, and they attended the premiere to loudly disparage the new symphony. Ultimately, the show went on, and the Third Symphony was a huge success.
The first movement begins with a bold statement of the pitches F-A♭-F, which many scholars believe represents Brahms’ s personal motto“ frei aber froh”(“ free but happy”), a supposed reference to the composer’ s contentment with being a bachelor. That musical signifier comes back regularly during the symphony, sometimes in very obvious ways and at other times more obscurely. It is a particularly distinctive group of notes, because the Third Symphony is in the key of F Major, but the pitches of the motto imply the key of F Minor.
The second movement features the clarinet playing a primary theme that is gentle and reminiscent of a beautiful picnic in the countryside. Instead of writing a quick, witty scherzo for the third movement, which was the norm at the time, Brahms composed an especially lyrical and intense waltz for the third movement. Mystery abounds in the opening of the fourth movement, with quiet rumblings in the strings giving way to march-like rhythms and ominous melodies. The drama increases for some time before fading away into a return of the F-A♭-F motto. The piece ends softly with poignant sweetness, an unusual and especially effective compositional decision.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
PAULA MAUST is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Peabody Conservatory. She is the author of Expanding the Music Theory Canon and performs extensively as a harpsichordist and organist.
22 | OVERTURE | BSOmusic. org