Overture Magazine: 2017-2018 Season September-October 2017 | Page 37

SOL GABETTA PERFORMS TCHAIKOVSKY
About the Concert
OVERTURE TO A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S
DREAM
Felix Mendelssohn
Born in Hamburg, Germany, February 3, 1809;
died in Leipzig, Germany, November 4, 1847
Felix Mendelssohn was truly a golden child,
blessed with brains and prodigious talent,
and a near-ideal environment in which to
cultivate them. His grandfather, Moses
Mendelssohn, had risen from poverty to
become an esteemed philosopher; his father,
Abraham, was one of Germany’s leading
bankers and had made the family fortune.
Both of Felix’s parents were highly educated
people and were determined that their
offspring should realize their full potential.
As Mendelssohn’s musical genius
hatched, he was able to spread his wings
into all the areas that distinguished his
adult career. Sunday-afternoon musicales
at the Mendelssohn household drew a
crowd of Berlin’s artistic elite and featured
the youngster as impresario, piano soloist,
conductor (sometimes of a full professional
orchestra) and composer. In 1825 when the
family moved to a grand estate in Berlin,
they converted the summerhouse in the
garden into an auditorium seating more
than 200. It was there, in the summer
or early fall of 1826, that the 17-year-old
prodigy premiered his A Midsummer
Night’s Dream Overture.
The Mendelssohn children were
enraptured with Shakespeare’s plays.
Family performances of their favorite,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a tale
of four mismatched lovers bedeviled by
fairies in an Athenian wood — led to
Felix’s precocious masterpiece. It is one
of the finest of Romantic overtures: cast
in traditional sonata form, but full of
programmatic correspondences to the
play’s plot and characters.
The opening is pure magic: four
soft woodwind chords raising the
curtain on a world of fantasy. This is
followed by soft, fleet, otherworldly
music for violins: an early example of
Mendelssohn’s trademark scherzo music,
here depicting the world of the fairies.
The world of mortals follows with a
loud theme full of pomp and grandeur,
representing the court of Theseus and
Hippolyta. We also meet two other
groups of mortals: the beleaguered
lovers (Hermia and Lysander, Helena
and Demetrius) in lyrical, yearning
music for clarinets and violins, and
finally the lower-class Athenian artisans
in a clod-hopping peasant dance,
punctuated with the hee-haws of Nick
Bottom (transformed by the fairies into
an ass). The development section is as
much a dramatic story as an imaginative
working-out of themes. In the overture’s
closing coda, the pompous court
theme is slowed down to make a lovely,
dreaming reverie for the violins, before
the four magical woodwind chords ring
down the curtain.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two
trumpets, tuba, timpani and strings.
VARIATIONS ON A ROCOCO THEME
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840;
decoration in 18 th -century palaces;
its popularity eventually gave name
to an entire cultural style of delicate
ornamentation and lightheartedness.
Tchaikovsky adopted the rococo spirit
here in his simple, graceful theme, in the
charm and fancifulness of his variations
and in the use of a small, Mozart-era
orchestra, with only pairs of woodwinds
plus strings to support the cello soloist.
In the seven variations that follow
the cello’s presentation of the theme,
Tchaikovsky sticks closely to the melody
so that we never forget its original shape.
Some moments to treasure include
the lengthy third variation, which is
a soulful, slow-tempo song for the
cello that is a masterpiece of heartfelt
lyricism. Variation five shows off the
soloist’s virtuosity with chains of trills,
an extremely wide range (Tchaikovsky
emphasizes the cello’s highest notes
throughout this work) and rapid
figurations. The sixth variation moves
into the minor mode with a darkly
melancholy Russian melody, exquisitely
accompanied by pizzicato strings and
woodwind solos.
died in St. Petersburg, Russia,
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two
November 6, 1893
clarinets, two bassoons, two horns and strings.
The year 1876 was one of low spirits for
Tchaikovsky; restless and irritable, he
traveled about Europe in search of the
creative muse. The first work he finally
wrote late in the year, the tempestuous
tone poem Francesca da Rimini,
reflected his mood, but the one that
followed in December, Variations on a
Rocco Theme, certainly did not. For in
this lovely work, the composer retreated
to the 18 th -century world of his favorite
composer, Mozart, and the quality
of balance it always gave his spirit.
“I don’t just like Mozart, I idolize him,”
he wrote a little later to his patroness,
Nadezhda von Meck. “Perhaps it is just
because—being a child of my time—
I feel broken and spiritually out of joint,
that I find consolation and rest in the
music of Mozart.”
“Rococo,” from the Italian word for
“shell,” was originally the name for a
shell-like ornament used for interior

PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN
Claude Debussy
Born in St. Germain-en-laye, France, August 22,
1862; died in Paris, France, March 25, 1918
In late-19 th -century Europe, fusion of the
various art forms became a hot topic in
creative circles. In Paris, a collaborative
movement emerged in which writers,
painters and musicians met regularly to
share ideas. Claude Debussy, who much
preferred the company of poets and
painters to that of fellow musicians, began
attending the Tuesday-evening gatherings
at the apartment of Stephane Mallarmé,
leader of the Symbolist poets. Aspiring
to a kind of verbal music, Mallarmé
and his fellow Symbolists emphasized
highly colored suggestions of mood and
atmosphere in their verse rather than
concrete descriptions or action.
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