Program Notes: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4

KAIJA SAARIAHO 
Ciel d’hiver (Winter Sky) 
BORN: October 14, 1952, in Helsinki, Finland 
DIED: June 2, 2023, in Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 2013 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 7, 2014, in Paris, France, with the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Fayçal Karoui. 

What to Listen For: 

• The harp plays circular glissandi — smeared notes that trace visibly overlapping circles on the harp’s strings — in the opening and closing section. 

The harp plays circular glissandi — smeared notes that trace visibly overlapping circles on the harp’s strings — in the opening and closing section. 

Upon her elevation to Academician of the Arts in 2023, Kaija Saariaho thanked the Finnish government for a “golden age” of arts grants and stipends that funded her early compositions. Despite such support, the composer still had to find her own path. “I didn’t come from musical circles at all ... I had nobody to guide me,” recalled Saariaho in a 2010 interview.  

She persisted, embarking on lessons with the gruff Paavo Heininen, who tried and failed to turn her away: “I had decided that I would not leave the room until he had taken me on.” After graduating from the Sibelius Academy, she journeyed to Germany, where studies with Brian Ferneyhough and others left her disinterested in “post-serial aesthetics, which forbid tonal explorations.” 

Saariaho made her way to Paris and found inspiration. “I arrived in the land of new harmonies, distantly reminiscent of music by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.” She took a course in computer music at IRCAM, a research institute founded by Pierre Boulez, and “started to learn about how sounds behave in space, how I could use my knowledge of the physical properties of sound in my orchestration and how I could realize my dream spaces.” By the end of the 1990s, Saariaho was counted among the most renowned Finnish composers since Jean Sibelius. In 2003, she received the capstone prize for composers, the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, for her opera L’Amour de loin. 

Ciel d’hiver (Winter Sky) was excerpted and rescored by the composer from a longer work, Orion, composed in 2002. Amid a churning swirl of muted strings, harp and guttural rumbling from the piano, Saariaho embellishes this dream space with an airy melody on the piccolo. Announced by a three-note figure, this incantatory theme is transformed by several instruments in succession: violin, clarinet, oboe and trumpet. 

Descending harp glissandi and hushed clusters in the horns precede the central section. After a glowering chord in the strings and piano, the entire orchestra glides, trills and roils as if to conjure a sky of scudding clouds and drifting stars. The solo piccolo reappears, followed by a piano lullaby bidding farewell to a dimming celestial firmament that is at once lustrous and lonely. 

MAURICE RAVEL 
Piano Concerto in G major 
BORN: March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France 
DIED: December 28, 1937, in Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1929–1931 
WORLD PREMIERE: January 14, 1932, in Paris, France, with soloist Marguerite Long and the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by the composer. 

What to Listen For: 

• The Concerto begins with what sounds like the crack of whip. Instead, a percussionist uses a slapstick made of two wooden boards joined at one end by a hinge. When swiped through the air, the boards separate and slap together, creating the whip-like sound. 

• While the rapid-fire notes of the Concerto test a pianist’s virtuosity, Ravel also requires the soloist to quietly accompany solos and brief passages by other instruments. 

“Take Jazz Seriously!” exhorted the title of a 1928 article by Maurice Ravel. Marveling at the singular blend of composition and improvisation in jazz, he found the music “thrilling and inspiring.” In 1928 at the height of the Jazz Age, Ravel visited Seattle for a solo piano recital. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that upon checking into his Seattle hotel, the composer “was interested in two things — getting his bright blue suspenders shortened and playing ‘Tea for Two,’ Rhapsody in Blue, ‘My Blue Heaven’ and other jazz tunes.” 

Ravel’s interest in jazz is reflected in the Allegramente of the Piano Concerto in G Major. Launched with a whipcrack and percolating piccolo line, the pianist serves as an accompanist playing cascading triplets (three notes in the time of two). A segue of manic, zig-zagging piano glissandi brings the orchestra to the fore. After a bluesy solo interlude by the piano, a Rhapsody-like clarinet chimes in. This unfurls a sequence of thrilling exchanges — and more than one sly nod to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody — between orchestra and soloist. 

Worrying about the solo of the Adagio assai, pianist Marguerite Long asked Ravel about maintaining the espressivo (“with expression” in Italian) of such a long flowing phrase. Ravel replied, “That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!” The tranquil Adagio showcases Ravel’s gift for translucent scoring and finely wrought writing for wind instruments.  

The Presto presents an immediate contrast; a scampering introduction recalls the whipcrack heard earlier and not only imports the braying clarinet from Rhapsody in Blue, but a twittering flute and a grunting trombone. Syncopated, off-beat accents add to an exuberant, at times cheeky, gallop towards a bravura ending. 

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY 
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 
BORN: May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia 
DIED: November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, Russia 
WORK COMPOSED: 1877–1878 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 22, 1878, in Moscow, Russia, with the orchestra of the Imperial Russian Musical Society conducted by Nikolay Rubenstein. 

What to Listen For: 

• According to the composer, “the seed of the whole symphony” — a fanfare propelled by a series of three-note figures — can be heard in the very beginning of the first movement. 

• In the finale, Tchaikovsky creates tension and excitement through call-and-response exchanges among strings, brass and winds. 

Sensitive, moody and at times deeply depressed — his family likened him to “a hothouse plant” as a child — Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed his Symphony No. 4 in F minor in 1877, the most tempestuous year of his life. Writing to his younger brother Anatoly, the composer outlined his “short period of insanity,” castigating himself as “the man who in May took it into his head to marry Antonina Ivanovna, in June wrote a whole opera [the still-popular Eugene Onegin] as if nothing had happened, in July got married and in September ran away from his wife.” After decamping to Italy to escape his marriage, the composer worked on orchestrating the music. 

Some scholars and critics have ascribed the impassioned nature of the Symphony (or all of his music) to Tchaikovsky’s guilt over his carnal and romantic love for men. Yet the composer’s letters tell a different story. What he seemed to dread above all else was being discovered and condemned for following his heart. While most of his siblings knew he was gay, he feared the impact on his family and reputation. In a September 1876 letter to his younger brother Modest, who was also gay, Tchaikovsky defiantly declared, “I am guilty of nothing!” 

Tchaikovsky dedicated the Symphony to Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow and businesswoman whose generous financial support — a monthly stipend of 1,500 francs — enabled him to focus on composing instead of teaching and reviewing concerts. By mutual agreement, they were never to meet in person. Except for a few distant glances of recognition at concerts, and a brief encounter in the woods of her estate (the composer tipped his hat and neither said a word), the two never met. 

Yet their voluminous written correspondence reveals illuminating insights into Tchaikovsky's creative process. Confiding to his patron and “best friend,” the composer explained to von Meck that the Symphony begins with a depiction of Fate, a fanfare propelled by a series of triplets. This Fate motive embodies “that inexorable force which prevents our aspirations to happiness from reaching their goal.” In addition to interrupting several passages, this motive insinuates its insistent rhythm throughout the first movement, notably in the music led by a loping clarinet and later bassoon, horn and oboe.  

For the composer, the contrast between anguish and delight in the Andante sostenuto—Moderato con anima mirrors life by depicting “a constant alternating between grim reality and evanescent visions and dreams of happiness.” 

A melancholy strain on the oboe opens the Andantino in modo di canzona. The strings swell into a hymn-like refrain and continue into the central section where the Fate motive, led by the brass, emerges briefly. The Andantino concludes with a bassoon solo discreetly buoyed by bowed and pizzicato strings — plucked notes on second violins, violas, cellos and double basses — a foretaste of the Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato. 

Tchaikovsky’s description of the “whimsical arabesques” of the Scherzo and its tiptoeing plucked notes is succinct: “First the strings play by themselves entirely pizzicato; in the trio the woodwinds enter and also play by themselves; they are replaced by the brass section, again playing alone; at the end of the scherzo all three groups answer one another in short phrases.” 

In the Finale: Allegro con fuoco (“quickly, with fire” in Italian) erupts with a joyous chord and scurrying strings chasing a snippet of a Russian folk song, “In the fields there stood a birch tree.” Tchaikovsky shapes this tune into a series of variations that veer from trepidation and resigned loneliness to uninhibited jubilation. The Fate motive eventually reappears, altered and seemingly vanquished. The symphony’s conclusion not only affirms that Fate, according to the composer, “reminds you of its existence” but also proclaims “one can live despite everything.” 

Christopher DeLaurenti © 2024 

Christopher DeLaurenti researches orchestral music, jazz, soundscape composition and computer music. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. Christopher has taught ongoing courses at the Peabody Institute, Cornish College of the Arts and The College of William & Mary.