{ program notes
The First Piece is built over a slow, simple theme in the violins, rocking over just two chords. The string orchestra is divided into many individual parts, and the texture becomes progressively richer.
The Second Piece is repetitious in a quicker tempo based on an actual Polish folk dance. The composer spices it with changing rhythmic accents and abrupt leaps upward in the violins.
The Third Piece is based on a 16 th-century Polish part song, and Górecki emphasized its antiquity by instructing the instruments to be played without vibrato to imitate presumed period performance style. The tranquil purity of this early sound is then juxtaposed against an aggressively modern treatment of the melody, played triple-forte in chords of crunchy dissonances.
Instrumentation: String orchestra.
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major
Ludwig van Beethoven
The Fourth Symphony is one of the least performed of Beethoven’ s mighty nine. And yet this fact can actually work to its advantage. Audiences may be better able to respond to this engaging work with the sense of discovery and delight it deserves. The Fourth has been unfortunately obscured by the overlapping shadows of the two formidable symphonies that preceded and followed it: the“ Eroica” and the Fifth. And while Beethoven’ s music is often revered for its grappling with big human issues and its sense of triumph over obstacles, the Fourth is not in this mold. Instead, it shows us the mischievous, life-affirming side of Beethoven’ s genius, and the obstacles it overcomes are purely musical. The conflict between lyrical melody and complex rhythmic play is helpful to remember when listening to this work.
Beethoven had already begun his Fifth Symphony when he broke away from it to compose the Fourth. By this time, he had more or less come to terms with his increasing deafness and found salvation from depression lay in work.“ I live only in my notes,” he wrote a close friend,“ and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I now write, I often find myself working on three, four things at once.”
The first movement begins with a slow introduction that suggests a weighty work. But suddenly a teasing series of upward flourishes gathers and explodes into the high-spirited Allegro vivace. Beethoven has played his first practical joke: the tragedy is really a comedy!
The battle between melody and rhythm is waged in the development section, where the violins and woodwinds trade back and forth a soaring theme against the staccato notes of the movement’ s principal subject. The section’ s master stroke begins as we hear a hushed drum roll on the home note of B-flat. The timpani then continue this roll for 22 measures while, as Lewis Lockwood tells us,“ the strings gradually whip up momentum.” It is one of the great dramatic moments in Beethoven.
The second movement, in E-flat Major, is one of Beethoven’ s slow-tempo rondos, as was the funeral-march movement of the“ Eroica.” The first violins spin a long descending melody, marked cantabile( singing). But while you luxuriate in this melody, don’ t ignore its halting accompaniment in the second violins. Later the clarinets offer their version of the long descending melody, now reversed into an ascending shape.
Returning to the key of B-flat, the third movement is a scherzo, with a rustic woodwind Trio section that suggests the“ Pastoral” Symphony’ s peasant dances. With both scherzo and trio sections repeated, this movement“ now stands up handsomely to the other large movements in its weight and length, rather than serving as a point of relaxation before the finale”( Lockwood).
The sonata-form finale is predominantly playful, but it is also energized by sharply accented cross rhythms and high-octane string writing. Still poking us in the ribs, Beethoven caps the work with a marvelously mischievous coda.
Instrumentation: Flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.
Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright © 2017
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