Program Notes: Michelle Cann Plays Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23

NINA SHEKHAR 
Lumina 
BORN: 1995 
WORK COMPOSED: 2020 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 28, 2020, in Los Angeles with the University of Southern California Thornton Symphony. 

What to Listen For:

• Murky sound clouds slowly morph while bright tones pierce the dense texture in a musical push and pull between light and dark.  

Murky sound clouds slowly morph while bright tones pierce the dense texture in a musical push and pull between light and dark.  

Nina Shekhar is widely recognized as an exciting new talent in the music world. A first-generation Indian American composer from Detroit who is currently pursuing her PhD in composition at Princeton University, she has won numerous awards and received commissions by the country’s leading artists and ensembles. Shekhar also holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and is a multi-instrumentalist, performing extensively on the flute, piano and saxophone. Her intensely personal music explores the intersections of identity, vulnerability, love and laughter.  

Lumina received the 2021 ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize, which is awarded annually to a composer whose work has not yet been performed professionally. Shekhar’s piece was written for the University of Southern California Thornton Symphony and has since been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic. The composer describes Lumina as an exploration of “the spectrum of light and dark and the murkiness in between.” Sonic clouds of dense harmonies and microtones — multiple inflections of pitches not found in traditional Western music — create blurry shadows from which shards of light emerge, created by harmonics and effects in the harp, percussion and violins.  

Shekhar also found inspiration in Hindustani classical music, where a soloist traditionally leads a group through a series of improvisations while the other musicians must listen and breathe together in order to follow as one. In Lumina, each disparate voice is connected to the next and the orchestra moves as though it were a living organism, large enough to hold vastly contrasting elements within its orbit. The silence found in between sounds also has significance for Shekhar. This work was written in the early months of 2020, before the pandemic took hold, and has since taken on new meaning for the composer; she relates the musical search for light in the shadows to finding hope amidst current challenges and the importance of creating silence and space to listen to each other to find meaning in our shared experiences.  

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488 
BORN: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg 
DIED: December 5, 1791, in Vienna 
WORK COMPOSED: 1786 
WORLD PREMIERE: 1786, in Vienna 

What to Listen For:  

• The clarinet’s warm tone and the piano’s intimate entrance in the second movement contribute to the emotional impact of this concerto.  

The clarinet’s warm tone and the piano’s intimate entrance in the second movement contribute to the emotional impact of this concerto.  

The year 1786 was a fruitful one for Mozart: he completed his opera The Marriage of Figaro, largely considered one of the best operas of all time, and composed three piano concertos, Nos. 22–24, each one a technical and expressive masterpiece. By then, Mozart was earning more as a performer than a composer and these concertos were written solely for his own use in concerts. All three remained unpublished at the time of his death. The Concerto No. 23 especially appealed to audiences for its emotional depth and remains one of his most popular concertos to this day. Mozart also had a special fondness for this work, writing in a letter to one of his earlier patrons that he stored the piece in a personal stack of “compositions that I keep for myself and for a small group of music-loving friends.”  

Nearly two centuries later, Joseph Stalin supposedly heard this concerto on the radio, played by Maria Yudina, a pianist who, though famous for her outspoken political views, was beloved by the Soviet leader. Stalin requested a copy of the piece from the radio station, yet Yudina’s performance had been live and unrecorded. That same evening, the radio quickly hired an orchestra and brought the soloist back to play, delivering the recording to Stalin the next day. This album was rumored to be on Stalin’s record player when he was found dead in his chambers in 1953, leading people to believe that Mozart’s concerto was the last thing he heard. Though the story is unverified, a recording of Yudina playing this piece does exist and is accessible online.  

Compared to many of Mozart’s first movements, this one is economical with its themes. The piano enters and elaborates on the orchestra’s music without introducing new material.  

Adding to the overall warmth and pathos of this concerto is Mozart’s use of clarinets in place of oboes. The clarinet brings a mellowness to the orchestra that differs from the brighter oboe. The prevalence of the woodwind parts, along with the absence of trumpet and timpani, adds to the concerto’s intimate nature and places it near the realm of chamber music.  

The sublime second movement begins with piano alone in F-sharp minor. Mozart was always very intentional about his choice of key signatures and this movement is the only time he made use of that key. The melody begins as a graceful and simple siciliano dance that gradually becomes more chromatic. The soaring strings enter with a descending line that is full of emotion. The subtlety within the dynamic interplay between soloist and ensemble creates a poignant sense of melancholy while also feeling effortless — a clear mark of Mozart’s genius. 

The final rondo leaps into action with a boisterous theme in the piano that is taken up by the orchestra and interspersed with jaunty riffs from the woodwinds. Mozart returns to the slow-movement key of F-sharp minor for a brief moment, casting doubt on the upbeat mood, but lands back in A major with joyful energy.  

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47 
BORN: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg  
DIED: August 9, 1975, in Moscow 
WORK COMPOSED: 1937 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 21, 1937, in Leningrad with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. 

What to Listen For:  

• The unsettling and haunting beauty of anguish and triumph in a symphony that was composed to appease an oppressive regime and evolved to symbolize the perseverance of the human spirit.  

Dmitri Shostakovich finished his First Symphony when he was just 19 and graduating from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. It immediately garnered praise and established him as an important composer. In the following years, he wrote music that was celebrated for its modernism, including his first piano concerto and a satirical opera, The Nose, based on a short story by Gogol. By 1936, the culture had shifted so drastically that Shostakovich came under intense scrutiny for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, when Stalin stormed out of the performance before it was over and declared it “degenerate” music. An article in the newspaper Pravda the next day titled “Chaos Instead of Music” attacked the composer for the immoral subject matter, lack of melody and “formalism” in the opera. Stalin went on to impose criteria for Soviet opera, demanding Socialist themes, “realistic” tonalities based on Russian folk songs and happy endings that glorified the State. In his memoirs, Shostakovich wrote that he was suddenly “an enemy of the people.” His Fourth Symphony was well under way but, fearful of too harsh a criticism, he shelved it and began work on his Fifth Symphony.  

Working within this new and impossible reality, Shostakovich composed a work that he declared represented “the making of a man,” in which “the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and the joy of living.” The premiere was met with great enthusiasm and a sense of relief. The audience was well aware of the pressure on the composer and the implications tied to the symphony’s success. A journalist described the work as “a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism,” and Shostakovich was thereby considered rehabilitated.  

Much beauty lies in the bleakness, intensity and irony of this symphony’s music. Though it fulfilled the Soviet mandates by ending on a note of triumph and victory, there is a sense of ambiguity and pain lying just below the surface of the work. The first movement contrasts dramatic jagged rhythms with long sustained melodies. There is tender vulnerability in the phrases as they reach to upper registers, searching and halting, growing more adamant as the movement continues.  

The Alegretto has a sinister humor with militaristic drums and seemingly innocent solos from the violin, flute and bassoon. The spacious Largo focuses on lush strings before the flute takes over, accompanied by sparse notes in the harp. The sonic landscape builds to a searing climax before retreating to a barely audible shimmer.  

The finale is a fervent march that veers from terrifying to heroic, ending with a relentless insistence that is both joyous and agonizing. Though scholars dispute the reliability of Shostakovich’s memoir, Testimony, it did shed light on the finale of the Fifth, quoting the composer as saying, “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat… It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’” 

All notes by Catherine Case © 2023