Season Schedule

Program Notes

The Jon Mac Anderson Program Notes underwritten by Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur, LLP

Anna Clyne (b. 1980): Stride
Instrumentation: Scored for string orchestra
Duration: 10 minutes

If you’ve ever wondered how Beethoven might have composed had he lived in our time, Clyne’s Stride might offer some clues. Besides direction quotations from the “Pathétique” Sonata for Piano, Clyne has managed to invoke some of the muscular qualities of Beethoven’s music, as is evident from the very opening of her thirteen-minute work, Stride, for strings, composed in 2020 to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. Cline has also invested her music with other Beethoven-esque features, including a focus on a series of brusque, tight motives, an extreme use of dynamics and, as well, a bass line from the Pathétique, a style of writing she connects with “stride” piano playing (that is, the left-hand broken octave patterns common to jazz pianists like Fats Waller and Art Tatum). Stride, therefore, hits its stride somewhere between the world of Beethoven and that of 1920s-30s American jazz piano playing.

Clyne, who is currently among a handful of highly sought-after young composers. Having served as Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, among others, her music was chosen to open the 2021-22 season of the New York Philharmonic. Stride gives a very good impression of Clyne’s general style, one capable of great warmth—she does not shy away from traditional tonalities or romantic gestures—but also inventive sounds. Besides listening for the Beethoven quotations (some may sound distantly familiar, whereas others will appear as unmistakable) note how strongly Cline separates the upper and lower strings. The work is in three distinct movements—Composed of three movements—Grave – Allegro di molto e con brio, Adagio cantabile and Rondo: Allegro—though they move directly from one to the next. Her hope is “by reimagining cells from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique”, her work will “sound both familiar and new.”

FROM THE COMPOSER:
Stride draws inspiration from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique, which is in three movements:
I. Grave – Allegro di molto e con brio
II. Adagio cantabile
III. Rondo: Allegro
I chose a few melodic, rhythmic and harmonic fragments from each movement (exhibited as an appendix to the score) and developed these in the three corresponding sections of Stride. The title is derived from the octave leaps that stride in the left hand in first movement of Sonata Pathétique. I was immediately drawn to the driving energy of this bass movement and have used it as a tool to propel Stride.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of oboes, flutes, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets and horns, timpani, and strings
Duration: 34 minutes

Inevitably, discussion about Beethoven’s majestic Third Piano Concerto swings around to the matter of the work’s key of C minor. Beethoven, like many composers, held strongly to the belief that every key held the promise of distinct qualities, some darker, others joyous, some introspective and others triumphant, in other words, a specific key for a specific mood. C minor, then, was a key Beethoven turned to for intensely personal reasons and his C minor scores were often imbued with intense drama, as expressed, for example, by the Fifth Symphony and the famous “Pathétique” Sonata, Op. 13, among a number of other C minor works. In this context we almost must also consider Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica,” in E flat, which shares C minor’s key signature and whose intense Funeral March Beethoven also set in the brooding key of C minor.

As it so happens, all of the above works belong to the same style period, the years 1798-1803. These were particularly difficult ones for the composer, both physically and psychologically, for not only did his loss of hearing become evident during this time but on the world stage Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, shattering Beethoven’s belief that the Corsican would stand up for the common man. Now Beethoven would have to find a way to exist in a world of increasing loneliness and disappointment.

In light of such drama, we can more easily comprehend Beethoven’s need to work with highly expressive tonalities, since for him music was often a means of intense personal expression, not simply of his woes but also his inherent belief in goodness.

Not incidentally, crafting a work of intense meaning required not only particular key relationships but also sufficient time to allow matters to unfold naturally. In both regards, Third Piano Concerto succeeds masterfully. The concerto not only opens with the longest orchestral exposition of any of Beethoven’s concertos—110 bars of music played by the orchestra alone before the soloist plays a note—but as a whole the work is actually significantly longer than the Mendelssohn’s 4th Symphony to be performed after intermission! We should also note that while much of the score is powerfully gripping, Beethoven is also capable of delivering beautiful melodies, as is evident in the first movement’s second theme, played first by the violins—a fitting example of how the same key signature can be used to craft two extremely different moods. Beethoven set the concerto’s second movement in the distantly related key of E major, which, coming on the heels of the stormy C minor ending of the Allegro con brio, feels like the breath from another world. Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny said it “must sound like a holy, distant and celestial harmony.” To amplify the effect, Beethoven opens the movement with piano alone. The opening of the Rondo finale immediately snaps us out of this reverie and plunges us back into the C minor landscape. But rather than Sturm und Drang, Beethoven toys with us, spiriting us back and forth between the major and minor modes and even treating his playful rondo theme to an academic fugue. For all his demons, Beethoven miraculously finds the means to revel in his art and open himself up to anyone willing to listen.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847): Symphony No. 4 “Italian” in A major, Op. 90
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of oboes, flutes, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets and horns, strings, and timpani
Duration: 27 minutes

Between the years 1829-30 Felix Mendelssohn undertook the “Grand Tour”, a journey of sorts experienced by many young people in Europe intent on gaining a deeper understanding of life beyond that experienced at home (think about young college students traveling around Europe on trains today). Mendelssohn’s travels took him first to England, Scotland, and Wales, giving rise to, among other works, the “Scottish” Third Symphony heard earlier this season and the Hebrides Overture. The twenty-one-year-old composer was working on some of this music as he traveled south to Italy, where he arrived in autumn and where he would remain for nine months.

Though he began drafts of what would emerge as his Fourth Symphony during his stay, work on the score continued until 1833, at which point his English commissioner was breathing down his neck to finish it. Mendelssohn returned to London in May of that year to conduct the premiere and though well received, he was less-than-satisfied with the product. The following year he revised the last three movements and had planned on further revisions but ultimately died before being able to see matters through. As with much of the composer’s music, it was published posthumously.

We tend to think of Mendelssohn as a Romantic and for good reason: his scores are imbued with lush melody and great warmth, characteristics of much of the music produced in the 19th century. Yet at heart Mendelssohn remained a classicist and these factors too are evident in the “Italian”—four movement form built of the traditional fast-slow-medium-fast pattern, duration (the work lasts about as long as a Mozart symphony and is significantly shorter than any number of symphonies of Beethoven) and scoring (see above), which is identical to that of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony performed earlier this season. We can argue what, if anything, is truly “Italian” in the score, though without question Mendelssohn captured a much lighter mood than that of the Scottish, for instance, and we can certainly imagine the young composer, soaking in the Italian sunshine and regretting cold, wet Germany to which he would soon return. Regardless of what its composer thought of the work, the Fourth Symphony has become an audience favorite, from the propelling drive of its opening bars to the dashing Saltarello at its close. Viva Italia!

(C) Marc Moskovitz
www.marcmoskovitz.com