Program Notes: Rachmaninov Symphony No. 1

GYÖRGY LIGETI 
Concert Românesc (“Romanian Concerto”) 
BORN: May 28, 1923, in Diciosânmartin (now Tîrnăveni), Romania 
DIED: June 12, 2006, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1951 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 1, 1952, in Budapest, Hungary 

What to Listen For: 

• Ligeti creates a sense of suspension and excitement by following the irregular (to us) beats and off-beat accents of Romanian folk music. 

Ligeti creates a sense of suspension and excitement by following the irregular (to us) beats and off-beat accents of Romanian folk music. 

“Composing for the bottom drawer” was how Ligeti often described writing music in 1950s Communist-ruled Hungary. Musical life fell under the watchful eye of Hungarian Musicians Union, which regulated what was performed, and according to Ligeti, who was allowed to get hold of manuscript paper. Even the delightful Concert Românesc, a folk-inspired orchestral suite influenced by Béla Bartók, was scrutinized by finicky authorities wary of anything borrowed (or smuggled in) from the decadent West.  

From the beginning, György (pronounced “Jurge” to rhyme with “surge”) Ligeti was an outsider. Born in Transylvania into a family of highly educated Hungarian Jews, Ligeti spent much of his youth immersed in Romanian culture. After the Nazis swept across Europe, he was subjected to brutal forced labor. He and his mother were the only members of his direct family to survive the Holocaust.  

After the war, Ligeti followed in the footsteps of his idol Bartók and studied Romanian folk songs. A half-century later, the composer remembered, “many of these melodies stuck in my memory and led in 1951 to the composition of my ‘Romanian Concerto.’” Ligeti did not identify his sources in the printed score, confessing “not everything in it is genuinely Romanian as I also invented elements in the spirit of the village bands.” 

The music is tuneful, spanning multiple moods, from the aching lament in the introduction to frolicsome and tempestuous middle movements. A jaunty finale teems with blazing violin solos and clattering brass. The third French horn, imitating a bucium — an instrument used for herding animals as well as sending messages over hilly and mountainous terrain — plays a crucial role at the end. 

Ligeti revised the “Romanian Concerto” in the mid-1990s. Counting it as a “bottom drawer” piece, he recalled that in 1951, an F-sharp clarinet note in the last movement (just before the bass drum booms) was deemed too dissonant. Ligeti claimed the work was banned as a result, however his memory misled him. One Union official did complain about the use of Romanian instead of Hungarian folk songs; nevertheless, the Concerto premiered and had several subsequent public performances in Hungary. Decades later, it now ranks internationally among the composer’s most popular works. 

BÉLA BARTÓK 
Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117 
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary 
DIED: September 26, 1945, in New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1937-1938 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 23, 1939, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

What to Listen For: 

• The first movement’s cadenza, a solo designed to challenge the violinist’s skill and finesse, includes quarter tones — haunting notes in between the standard do-re-mi of the Western scale. 

The first movement’s cadenza, a solo designed to challenge the violinist’s skill and finesse, includes quarter tones — haunting notes in between the standard do-re-mi of the Western scale. 

Béla Bartók was not only a composer but a pioneering ethnomusicologist. Hunting for what he called “peasant music,” the composer hauled a bulky and cantankerous wax cylinder phonograph to villages across the hinterlands of Eastern Europe, Turkey and North Africa. The term “peasant music” to Bartók was never an insult but used with respect and profound admiration. Writing eight years before the debut of his Violin Concerto No. 2, the composer grandly declared the songs he found to be “the ideal starting point for a music renaissance.” 

Bartók’s beloved peasant music appears immediately in the Allegro non troppo. Plush, thrumming harp chords evoke the düvö, a traditional accompaniment to Hungarian dances. The strings, accompanying the harp, play pizzicato — plucked instead of bowed notes — on the first and fourth beats. Just before the entrance of the soloist, the pattern momentarily shifts to the first and third beats, giving the violin melody extra lift. The composer employs what we might hear as hiccup or rhythmic stutter throughout the Concerto to build tension. 

After jocular exchanges with the flute and clarinet, a second theme emerges. Edgy and dissonant, this fragment is echoed by the strings and winds, and soon dies away. The düvö heard in the harp returns along with somewhat tempered high spirits in the solo violin. The opening melody finally reappears, descending from a stratospheric height to absorb the second theme in a moody cadenza. 

Theme and Variations: Andante tranquillo flows through six variations, each elegantly sequenced with fascinating instrumental combinations and textures. In addition, the violin soloist has a different entrance in every variation, from the trill in variation four to the rushing, off-kilter groups of five, six and seven notes in the last variation. The movement concludes with muted violins playing a poignant, almost icy chorale. 

The Rondo: Allegro molto is an exciting, often stampeding, set of variations on the Allegro non troppo — a reflection of what the composer admitted was “my natural tendency to vary and transform.” Bartók wrote two endings for the Concerto; the first features a tremendous brass flourish while the second, with its trilled double stops and bravura passages, rightly spotlights the soloist, and will be what is heard here tonight. 

SERGEI RACHMANINOV 
Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op. 13 
BORN: April 1, 1873, in Oneg, an estate outside of Novgorod, Russia 
DIED: March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 1895 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 27, 1897, in St. Petersburg, Russia 

What to Listen For: 

• An almost Debussy-like interlude with flutes, clarinet and bassoon in the first movement; the atypical time signature (7/4) and use of triplets (three notes played in the time of two) lend this passage a lofty, timeless feeling. 

An almost Debussy-like interlude with flutes, clarinet and bassoon in the first movement; the atypical time signature (7/4) and use of triplets (three notes played in the time of two) lend this passage a lofty, timeless feeling. 

Rachmaninov was traumatized after the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in D minor. He confided to his publisher, “I composed nothing for about three years. I felt like a man who had suffered a stroke and for a long time had lost the use of his head and hands. I won’t show the Symphony to anyone, and I’ll make sure of this when I write my will.” 

The composer was true to his word. Languishing in the proverbial bottom drawer, the Symphony was never heard again in his lifetime. When he left Russia in 1917, Rachmaninov did not take the materials with him. The manuscript vanished and was reconstructed in 1945 from orchestral parts tucked away at the Leningrad Conservatory. 

The Grave—Allegro ma non troppo opens with a dour announcement by three quickly rising notes (also called a “triplet”) followed by a lower, longer note. This motif launches each movement of the Symphony, whose melodic material derives mainly from Russian Orthodox chant. 

The motif expands throughout the Allegro ma non troppo with exchanges among oboe, bassoons and flutes. The entire orchestra eventually returns to a shorter, truculent version of the motif in resolute, and at times angry tuttis. A hasty, accelerating march ends the movement abruptly. 

The Allegro animato suggests a playful scherzo, but a reversed version of the motif played by the timpani triggers the first in many mercurial shifts in mood. Hints of “Dies Irae,” a Gregorian chant (“Day of Wrath” in Latin) heard in the Mass for the Dead emerge only to be thwarted by the optimistic tings of a triangle. Rachmaninov leavens the movement with a variety of episodes, including a Romani-inflected solo for violin and pizzicato strings. 

A sumptuous Larghetto presents the motif delicately rendered by the violas and accompanied by hushed brass and winds. The composer inverts the turbulent mood of the Allegro animato with pastoral solos from the clarinet and oboe as well as by transferring a slow yet restless two note motto in the strings to the flute and clarinet. Glowering timpani and double basses foreshadow the closing Allegro con fuoco and its commanding trumpet tattoos, crashing cymbals and regal tuttis. Tambourine and triangle usher in a recollection of an episode from the Larghetto, but the Symphony inexorably hurtles towards a sinister finale, reflecting a passage from the Bible (Romans 12:19) Rachmaninov added to the score: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” 

All notes by Christopher DeLaurenti © 2023