SUPPORT YOUR SYMPHONY

Judith Fong Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot leads the Seattle Symphony with guest pianist Jan Lisiecki through the program, which occurs September 22, 23 and 24. Photo by Jim Holt.

GABRIELLA SMITH 
Tidalwave Kitchen 
BORN: December 26, 1991, in Berkeley, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 2012, revised 2022 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 10, 2012, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 

What to Listen For: 

• Portable percussion instruments, including a large crotales and a temple bowl, both placed on the set of timpani for greater resonance. 
• Extended techniques — traditional instruments making unexpected sounds — are a hallmark of the composer’s music. 

Gabriella Smith’s dedication to environmental conservation is central to her music. Born into the West Coast’s culture of outdoor recreation, Smith volunteered at a songbird research center for five years. Today, she regularly ventures out on long backpacking trips. Despite growing up in the Bay Area ringed by forests, parks and wilderness preserves, it was Smith’s move to the East Coast that transformed her approach to composing. Longing for the beauty of home, she began integrating the soundscape of the natural world into her music. After graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music, Smith studied at Princeton with Steven Mackey, Paul Lansky, Dmitri Tymoczko and other noted composers. 

Smith’s compositions embrace the complexity of our biosphere: Mysterious yet organic forms emerge framed by careening melodic figures and shifts in harmony. She also employs extended techniques often to instigate or propel rhythmic movement. In the preface to her first orchestral work, Tidalwave Kitchen, Smith reflected on the influence of nature: 

“I wrote Tidalwave Kitchen while a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, homesick for the beautiful and dramatic landscape of the Northern California coast that I loved and missed so much. The piece is inspired by my many memories of hikes shrouded in fog, tide pooling on the rocky beaches, and sitting by the Pacific listening to the hallucinatory sounds of the ocean, the keening gulls, pounding surf, sizzling of sand and sea foam, drifting in and out of fog and clarity, order and randomness, reality and imagination.” 
 

EDVARD GRIEG 
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 
BORN: June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway 
DIED: September 4, 1907, in Bergen, Norway 
WORK COMPOSED: 1868, revised 1907 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 3, 1869, in Copenhagen, Denmark 

What to Listen For: 

• The spectacular cadenza — a bravura solo passage intended to challenge the pianist’s courage and skill — near the end of the first movement. 
• A pastoral flute solo appears unexpectedly after one of the rowdier oom-pah passages in the finale. 

Grieg missed the premiere of his Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 16. Toiling as a working musician, he was too busy conducting and teaching 375 miles away in Oslo to attend. Luckily, Grieg’s absence mattered little. Misfortune was averted by a dedicated soloist who enthusiastically participated in extra rehearsals, the presence of Queen Louise of Denmark and a standing ovation that swept up three influential critics. The struggling composer’s triumph — albeit in absentia — galvanized the enduring fame of his music.  

Grieg’s first and only concerto bursts open with a timpani roll and an emphatic entry by the pianist. This first theme — a volley of chunky, tumbling chords — is quickly contrasted with a yearning secondary theme in the winds. Several episodes of short solos and duets, notably for flute and horn, follow in succession. A commanding pronouncement by the entire orchestra launches the cadenza. By turns defiant, exuberant and meditative, this tour de force spans the entire range of the keyboard, from growling bass notes to the sparkling top register. The orchestra has the last word, repeating the first theme heard earlier with a firm cadence. 

The middle Adagio flows into a bittersweet hymn. Refrains from the winds and strings frame the piano as it meanders through disguised, delicately chiming (and a few pleading) variations of the first theme. Marked Lento (“slow”), hushed notes of a spread-out D-flat major chord clamber up the keys and conclude the movement. 

Grieg imbued the finale with a halling, a competitive foot-stamping dance from rural Norway. What we hear as uproarious fun today was daring in the concert hall for Grieg. Béla Bartók, a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, found Grieg’s embrace of folk music to be liberating, claiming that “Grieg was the first composer to throw the German yoke from his shoulders.”  

After a truncated cadenza-like opening, the soloist lurches into the halling’s feisty two-step, which is echoed by the orchestra. The piano detours into animated variations of the first theme, stretching those opening chunks into rippling and ringing waterfalls of sound. For a few moments Grieg’s innovative writing foreshadows the vaporous textures of Debussy and Ravel. The oom-pah halling rhythm and the first theme’s avalanche of chords soon become entwined. Playfully exchanging grandiose chords and tuttis, pianist and orchestra stride as one towards a majestic finish. 
 

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY 
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, TH 30, “Pathétique” 
BORN: May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia 
DIED: November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, Russia 
WORK COMPOSED: 1893 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 28, 1893, in St. Petersburg, Russia 

What to Listen For: 

• Tchaikovsky’s use of silence throughout the first movement signals turbulent changes in mood and tempo. 
• The rousing third movement seems to end the symphony, but wait for the final, fourth movement, a heartfelt adagio (Italian for “slowly”). 

From the sobriquet “Pathétique” to the Tchaikovsky’s shocking death nine days after conducting the premiere, the Symphony No. 6 in B Minor has become cocooned in mythology. Contrary to popular belief, Tchaikovsky deliberately added “Pathétique” to the symphony's title. He discussed it with his publisher in several letters and scrawled “Simphonie pathétique” on the title page of the score. Nor is “Pathétique” a mistranslation, except to those English speakers who associate “pathetic” with the embarrassing inability to make an obvious choice or accomplish a discernible, achievable task. As a fluent speaker of French — the language of Czarist Russia’s aristocracy and upper classes — Tchaikovsky understood the word to connote tragic suffering and profound melancholy. 

Tchaikovsky’s sixth and final symphony emerged from a creative crisis. In late December of 1892, the composer found himself in Berlin, depressed. He wrote to his nephew: “Maybe I could still summon up inspiration to write program music but pure music — i.e. symphonic and chamber music — I should not write any more.” Like many 19th century composers, Tchaikovsky wrote program music in which the composer portrays an image, scenario or story. By contrast, audiences and critics expected so-called “pure” or absolute music to exude transcendental qualities beyond images, beyond language. The stakes were higher, too. Composers were expected to innovate while honoring classic forms and practices such as ending with a fast, uplifting movement. 

Tchaikovsky found a solution. Months before putting pen to paper, he had already imagined a program for his sixth symphony, recalling in a letter “I wept many times, during my travels, while composing it in my mind.” But he decided to keep the program’s text secret and only hint at its existence. When pressed by conductor Walter Damrosch, he demurred, “No, that I shall never tell....” Dying of cholera nine days after the symphony’s premiere, Tchaikovsky never revealed his program, save for one unmissable hint (and shortest program note ever) in the title, “Pathétique.” 

The opening Adagio begins with a morose, almost subterranean theme by the solo bassoon and strings. After two dramatic pauses, the theme shifts upwards, elongated by oboe, clarinet and violas. The mood changes suddenly with a sprightly dance, though gloomy undertones persist. Argumentative brass power a fiery yet short-lived climax only to subside into a song heard in the strings. An optimistic march unfurls a glorious, rising melody that eventually disintegrates into a wistful tune led by the clarinet. A jolting tutti from the orchestra ignites a racing, thundering peroration. The movement concludes with a slow procession marked cantabile (“songlike”). 

The following Allegro con grazia is an off-kilter waltz. Instead of the expected three-beat pattern, Tchaikovsky fashions a giddy dance of swaying groups of twos and threes. Buoyant high spirits spill over into the third movement. The composer not only fulfills the expectation of a playful scherzo but scaffolds courtly exchanges among strings, horns and winds into an exhilarating, magisterial march. 

Boldly, Tchaikovsky did not end the “Pathétique” with a victory. “The symphony will have many innovations in its form,” he told his nephew. “Among other things, the Finale will not be a loud allegro, but the opposite, the most lingering adagio.” In place of triumph, the finale welcomes the listener’s brooding, mourning, nostalgic contemplation. 

Scholars continue to decipher the program of the “Pathétique” by seeking clues in Tchaikovsky’s scores and letters. Some still speculate about coded messages rooted in the composer’s life as a gay man forbidden by unjust societal strictures to love openly. But Tchaikovsky’s eternal secret mirrors a paradoxical truth embedded in the symphony. While love’s specific delights, joy, anguish and pain are unique (and private, personal) experiences, these vulnerable aspects of love — and its loss — remain universal and timeless. 

© 2022 Christopher DeLaurenti