Program Notes: Opening Night: Grieg’s Piano Concerto

Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 by Edvard Grieg

Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg embarked on his first and only piano concerto at a truly happy period in his life. He’d married the love of his life in 1867, and the couple’s daughter was born in 1868. That same year, while taking a holiday in Denmark to enjoy the warmer climate — compared to Norway, remember — the 25-year-old Grieg penned the first draft of his famous concerto.

Despite his sunny personal outlook, the piece opens with a thunderous timpani roll and explosive piano chords, portentous and tempestuous. The woodwinds introduce the melody of the first theme, a march-like tune set against syncopated strings. This piano repeats this first theme and decorates it with flowing arpeggios. A brief transition accelerates the music, and then the cellos introduce the movement’s more lyrical second theme, romantic and sighing. These two themes alternate and combine and modulate throughout the movement.

Next, the second movement, a slower, gentler affair, is in ternary form (ABA) and also nods to the music of his homeland. Its opening and closing are introspective bookends to a more passionate middle section.

To date, most of the more famous piano concertos were Austro-Germanic, composed by the likes of Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Schumann. (Grieg’s concerto pays direct homage to Schumann’s, which opens in a similarly explosive manner and the same key.) While Grieg, who studied music in the German city of Leipzig, does use German forms, he draws on Scandinavian folk music for the concerto’s melodic content, though he doesn’t quote any particular folk songs outright.

The opening motif in the piano, for example, is made up of melodic gestures common in Norwegian tunes. The finale is a decorated adaptation of a Norwegian Halling Dance, an athletic style of dance typically performed by young men at weddings. (Grieg’s own nuptials were still on his mind, it seems.) The dance’s steps include moves like the “nakkespretten” (neck jump) and the “hodestift” (going over the head). Grieg’s music is light, lithe, and rhythmic, with the piano weaving nimbly through a stern orchestral accompaniment. As in the first movement, two contrasting themes blend and evolve throughout, culminating in a grand major-key climax that brings back the concerto’s opening timpani roll.

Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major, Op. 100 by Sergei Prokofiev

Terribly competitive and fiercely arrogant, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev called his fifth symphony,

“Very important not only for the musical material that went into it, but also because I was returning to the symphonic form after a break of 16 years. The Fifth Symphony is the culmination of an entire period in my work. I conceived of it as a symphony on the greatness of the human soul.”

This loftiness was a response and an escape from the difficult realities he faced in the final years of World War II. Like numerous other prominent Soviet artists, Prokofiev had evacuated Moscow to work at a state-sponsored artists’ retreat, the Composers’ House in Ivanova. His first marriage had collapsed, and he was living with a much younger poet. A concussion from a fall marked a turn for the worse in his health that would plague him until his death.

Still, he completed the fifth symphony in only a month, quite fast for the normally painstaking composer. The slow first movement opens with an airy, pastoral theme in the flutes. Repeated in the strings, with colorful harmonies adding zest and life. After a couple of minutes, flutes and oboes introduce a lighter, slightly faster tune, with shivering strings accompanying. These two contrasting themes blend and transform throughout the movement in traditional “sonata form,” which includes formal sections like the exposition, development, and recapitulation.

Many traditional symphonic movements are built from two contrasting themes or thematic groups. The second movement is another example. It is a scherzo, a clever, slinking tune in the clarinet winding its way through a mechanical, staccato string accompaniment. Later, a slower, brighter, smoother music erupts in the winds and brass to provide balance. These styles alternate and vie for prominence, with a sharp, quacking transition for the brass returning the movement to its snarky opening mood before the finale.

The third movement is dreamy and slow, with the clarinet featuring prominently once more. Though meditative, there is a heaviness to the music that carries the weight of the world and war. Finally, to close, Prokofiev returns to the theme of the first movement, now in the cellos. Soon, the music brightens and quickens, another precocious tune in the clarinet whisking along. Different sections bicker and chatter, and the music builds to a great proclamation in the brass before a mad dash to the close.

Prokofiev himself conducted the first performance of the fifth symphony in Moscow in 1945, with a brief pause in the middle due to cannon fire in the city. It was to be his last time on the podium due to declining health. A Soviet pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, captured the moment in an essay,

The Great Hall was illuminated, no doubt, the same way it always was, but when Prokofiev stood up, the light seemed to pour straight down on him from somewhere up above. He stood like a monument on a pedestal. And then, when Prokofiev had taken his place on the podium and silence reigned in the hall, artillery salvos suddenly thundered forth. His baton was raised. He waited, and began only after the cannons had stopped. There was something very significant in this, something symbolic. It was as if all of us — including Prokofiev — had reached some kind of shared turning point.

William Tell Overture by Giaochino Rossini

In Medieval Europe, a legendary archer rallies his oppressed countrymen to throw off the yoke of tyranny.

It’s not England’s Robin Hood. It’s William Tell, a Swiss folk hero who famously shoots an apple off his son’s head in one of the better-known moments in the hero’s legend. Giaochino Rossini, the world-renowned Italian opera composer and foodie, composed his final opera before retiring based on a French play about Tell for the basis of his work.

In four acts, the opera delves into the Austrian occupation of Switzerland in the 12th century, painting a vivid picture of the injustices faced by the Swiss with plot threads of forbidden love, treachery, and courage. In a moment of cruelty, an Austrian governor orders an apple placed on Tell’s son’s head and for Tell to shoot it off with an arrow. Tell’s son accepts and refuses to be tied up, while Tell secretly takes two arrows, one for the apple and one for the governor, in case his aim is awry.

Tell is successful, and later he and his son lead the beginning of a rebellion against the Austrians that begins with Tell shooting the governor straight in the heart.

The opera isn’t often performed in full anymore, but the overture, which Rossini composed last and in a great hurry as was his procrastinatory custom, has been immortalized thanks to the famous gallop. It’s in four distinct sections: The morning theme for cello chorus and bass accompaniment, the crashing storm, the “call to the dairy cows” featuring the English horn in a famous solo synonymous with morning music today, and the ubiquitous gallop, the “March of the Swiss Soldiers” before the Lone Ranger and Silver (Hi-ho, Silver, away!) co-opted the tune. The rhythm of this final march, of course, mimics the galloping steps of a horse (ta-da-duh, ta-da-duh) and races at breakneck speed to a triumphant close.

Rossini himself, born to musical parents in Pesaro, Italy, was a remarkably prolific composer in his early life and retired happily at the age of 37. William Tell was his 29th and final opera. A lover of fine food and wine and a wit to boot, Rossini remarked on his retirement, “I got tired of writing for singers who knew less about music than I did.” He lived comfortably on his earnings from his operas for the remainder of his days.