Wednesday 24 June

George Gershwin
Piano Concerto in F major
¹⁹²⁵

1. Allegro
2. Adagio – Andante con moto
3. Allegro agitato

Yuja Wang piano

It was immediately after the success of his Rhapsody in Blue, written for the jazz-band leader Paul Whitehouse in 1924, that George Gershwin was asked by conductor Walter Damrosch to write a piano concerto for the New York Symphony. Despite the runaway success of the Rhapsody, the pressure was on. Apart from the fact that expectations were high – violinists Jascha Heifetz and Joseph Joachim as well as Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky had all been at the Rhapsody premiere – the new commission would draw Gershwin yet further into the classical firmament. And, while he was able to leave the scoring of the earlier work to Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé (a common practice for Broadway composers), this time Gershwin would have to produce his own.

As a 26-year-old about to take on his first symphonic score, the young composer was uncertain of his classical credentials, but he boned up on form and orchestration and, once he had scored the concerto, hired New York’s Globe Theatre and a 60-piece band for a run-through. Writing in 1933, though, it was as if Gershwin’s confidence had never been in question:

_{THE CONCERTO}

For sure, the Concerto opens with a bold statement: a chest-thumping percussion fanfare that quickly leads to a snappy Charleston rhythm and then to a skipping rising–falling tune on solo bassoon (followed by bass clarinet). All these motifs will return, as will the slow bluesy theme with which the solo piano first enters. As these ideas rotate, and sometimes ingeniously collide, there’s a wealth of new ideas, styles and moods, plus another unforgettable tune: a warm, sweeping melody first heard on violins and cor anglais. Likewise, the solo pianist negotiates a breathless array of textures, from racing filigree passage-work to crashing accompanying chords right out of the warhorse concertos of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

If this first movement, for Gershwin, represented ‘the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life’, the slow central movement is a more intimate nocturne, at least in the languorous solo muted trumpet (then oboe) of its introduction. The piano then enters to brighten the mood; after the distant trumpet sounds again, the piano returns for a moonlit, improvisational cadenza, out of which emerges the movement’s big melody, espressivo con moto, on strings.

Gershwin described the finale as ‘an orgy of rhythms’ and it launches in with ferocious, motoric movement. There’s almost no let up over its entire span, except at the end, for a grandiose, technicoloured revival of the first movement’s sweeping theme.

_{Note by Edward Bhesania Edward Bhesania is a writer and editor who contributes to The Stage and The Strad; he has also written for The Observer, Country Life, International Piano and The Tablet.}

_{Image: El pianista by Maria Blanchard, 1919}

Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No 5 in D minor Op 47
¹⁹³⁷

1. Moderato
2. Allegretto
3. Largo
4. Allegro non troppo

_{POLITICAL PRESSURES}

Political and artistic pressures coincided many times in the course of Shostakovich’s career, but never more intensely than in the year 1937, when the Fifth Symphony was composed. Early in 1936 his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the ballet The Limpid Stream had been officially condemned, and in consequence he felt obliged to withdraw his Fourth Symphony before its scheduled premiere. These works, which are full of a wayward, dissonant genius, made no concession to the official doctrine of Socialist Realism, and the bleak endings of both opera and symphony directly contradicted the optimism then expected from Soviet artists.

The crisis he faced was far more than a question of musical style: it was quite literally a matter of life or death. By 1936 the mechanism of Stalin’s Great Terror was lurching into motion, with show trials, denunciations and disappearances. Few Russians remained untouched, particularly in the composer’s own city of Leningrad. Shostakovich himself lost relatives, friends and colleagues. A particularly serious blow was the arrest and execution in June 1937 of his highly-placed protector Marshal Tukhachevsky; association with such an ‘enemy of the people’ put Shostakovich in a highly dangerous position.

_{COMPOSING THE FIFTH SYMPHONY}

It was in this nightmare atmosphere that Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony, between April and July 1937. A conscious attempt at rehabilitation, intended to re-establish his credentials as a Soviet composer, it represents a well-calculated combination of true expression with the demands of the State. The premiere, given by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the relatively unknown Yevgeny Mravinsky on 21 November 1937, was an unqualified triumph, with scenes of wild enthusiasm which were repeated at the Moscow premiere the following January. The first performance outside Russia took place in Paris that June, and before long the Symphony had been performed all over the world and was being held up as a model of what Soviet music could and should be.

The Symphony certainly represents a break with Shostakovich’s unruly musical past, for here the language is simplified, with few of the eccentricities that had made him such a great satirist in the first decade of his career. The level of dissonance is lower and the music is contained within a clear formal plan. There is not, however, any radical change of style. Shostakovich’s unmistakable fingerprints – unexpected twists in melody and harmony, strange scoring, sometimes eccentric or shrill, with writing in the extremely high or low registers – are all present, but now absorbed into a traditional four-movement symphonic structure of great clarity and power.

_{FIRST AND SECOND MOVEMENTS}

As he would later in the first movements of his Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, Shostakovich immediately creates a sense of enormous space, both brooding and desolate, with a masterly control of slow pacing and pared-down orchestral textures. The first movement’s climax, reached after a remorseless build-up of tension (from the moment the piano enters), bursts out into a grotesque march, followed by a sense of numb exhaustion.

The second movement, a type of sardonic scherzo, preserves some of the qualities of the earlier Shostakovich in its shrill scoring, use of wry parody and vulgar march and dance elements, an important part of his inheritance from Mahler.

_{THIRD MOVEMENT}

The brooding Largo is the expressive heart of the symphony. Listeners who had until then known only the witty or irreverent side of Shostakovich would have been surprised by the depth of feeling here: many at the premiere were reduced to tears by its controlled anguish. Much of the emotional power is due to the long, sustained melodic lines and restrained instrumentation. The brass instruments are all silent, even the quietly sustaining horns.

_FINALE

Most of the controversy surrounding the symphony is concerned with the real significance of the finale and particularly of its last few minutes, blatant with D major brass fanfares and battering drums. There is no doubt about the overwhelming sense of musical resolution here, but most verbal commentary has done little but confuse the issue. A constant problem with Shostakovich is that his own remarks should never be taken too seriously, for he notoriously said what people wanted to hear. The façade he presented was that of a cool professional, an efficient servant of the Soviet State, and on the occasion of the Moscow premiere he quoted an unnamed Soviet critic to the effect that his Fifth Symphony was ‘the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism’, a phrase that was for many years accepted in the West as the composer’s own subtitle.

The main outline of the post-Beethoven Romantic symphony, opening in conflict and arriving at a triumphant apotheosis, certainly allows an orthodox interpretation of the Symphony as a description of the creation of Soviet Man, and it was in these terms that Shostakovich spoke of it at the time:

But in Testimony, the reminiscences attributed by Solomon Volkov to the sick and embittered composer towards the end of his life, this is all turned upside-down. ‘I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth … it’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shakily, and go off muttering ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’.’

_{Note by Andrew HuthAndrew Huth is a musician, writer and translator who writes extensively on French, Russian and Eastern European music.}

_{Image: Girls in the Fields by Kazimir Malevich, 1932}

Michael Tilson Thomas
^{LSO Conductor Laureate}

Michael Tilson Thomas is Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, Founder and Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to conducting the world’s leading orchestras, MTT is also noted for his work as a composer and a producer of multimedia projects that are dedicated to music education and the reimagination of the concert experience. He has won eleven Grammys for his recordings, is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and is a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

_{Image: Art Streiber}

Yuja Wang
^piano

Critical superlatives and audience ovations have continuously followed Yuja Wang’s dazzling career. The Beijing-born pianist, celebrated for her charismatic artistry and captivating stage presence, is set to achieve new heights during the 2019/20 season, which features recitals, concert series, as well as season residencies, and extensive tours with some of the world’s most venerated ensembles and conductors.

Yuja received advanced training in Canada and at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007 when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She later signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and recordings.

_{Image: Julia Wesely}