Czech Philharmonic • New Year’s Concerts

The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Festive Overture in A major, Op. 96, by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906‒1975) amount to one of those incredible tales separating geniuses from mere mortals. Shostakovich’s friend, the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, recalled how in the autumn of 1954 he happened to be present at the composer’s home when the conductor of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre Vasily Nebolsin stopped by for an unplanned visit. Because of mysterious political manoeuvring and bureaucratic red tape, the orchestra had been ordered at the last-minute to commission and perform a new work in celebration of the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution. The concert was scheduled to take place just three days later! Shostakovich did not so much as flinch, and he began composing immediately. “The speed at which he was writing was truly stupendous”, said Lebedinsky, who was seated beside the composer. “And while he was writing the lightweight, uncontroversial music, he was able to talk and make jokes at the same time that he was composing, just like the Mozart of legend. He laughed and chuckled, all the while quickly jotting down the flood of ideas into the score. The work went on almost without interruption.” Couriers were constantly racing back and forth between the flat and the theatre, delivering the score literally a page at a time for copyists to write out the orchestral parts. The premiere took place on 6 November 1954 at the Bolshoi Theatre under the baton of Alexander Melik-Pashayev. Lebedinsky summed up his impressions from hearing the new overture as follows: “A brilliant, sparkling work that gushes forth like freshly opened champagne!” Shostakovich’s score bears no traces of haste or unresolved details. The opening brass fanfare, which returns before the end of the overture, is borrowed from the composer’s Children’s Notebook, Op. 69 (from the movement “Birthday”). The other musical ideas in the fast section, often evoking the radiant brilliance of Glinka’s overture Ruslan and Ludmila, came as an instantaneous, powerful spark of inspiration. Shostakovich’s Festive Overture has often been played on ceremonial occasions, and in 1980 it was chosen as the musical theme for the Moscow Summer Olympics.

Maurice Ravel (1875‒1937), a French composer with Basque roots, played the piano from the age of four, but he made progress as a composer only gradually. The piano cycle Miroirs (Mirrors, 1904‒1905) clearly embraced the new Impressionist movement and became a resounding success. Ravel created more colourful orchestral versions of two movements from the cycle: A Boat on the Ocean and Morning Song of a Jester, better known by its Spanish title Alborada del grazioso. Alborada (from the Spanish word albor meaning ‘dawn’) is a kind of shepherd’s folksong celebrating daybreak and the rising sun, a distant cousin of the French aubade, a morning love song. The word “grazioso” has its roots in Spanish comedy and means a brilliant jester, a grotesque lover, or a witty prankster. Above all, Ravel’s Alborada is a Spanish genre piece full of life, fiery temperament, and energetic motion, and its melodies and rhythms are linked to the music of Iberian folk dances. Ravel created the orchestral arrangement at the suggestion of the legendary impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the composite production Les Jardins dʼAranjuez, which consisted of music by various composers for the 1919/1920 season of the Ballets Russes in London.

Paul Dukas (1865‒1935) was a Frenchman ten years older than Ravel. After studying at the Paris Conservatory and failing in the competition for the Prix de Rome, he entered musical life as a member of a group of traditionalists who were fostering the legacy of their teacher, César Franck. Engaging in friendly conversation with Claude Debussy, he arrived at the realisation that he needed to free himself from the ideas of Romanticism in order to reach the modern listener. Despite his efforts in that direction, Dukas remained somehow at the border between the past and the future. He composed barely twenty works, amongst which the brilliantly fanciful opus Lʼapprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) is by far the best known. In 1906, he composed his brief but brilliant Villanelle for French horn and piano as a contest piece (morceau de concours) for the final examinations of horn players at the Paris Conservatoire. An orchestral version appeared later. The title is derived from the Italian word villanelle, a rustic farmer’s song or “song for the outdoors” popular in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Dukas’s composition retains something of the pastoral atmosphere of carefree happiness. Villanelle begins with a lyrical fanfare evoking the sound of the natural horn, but the technical passages that follow require the valves of the modern horn to allow for chromaticism and technical fluidity.

The great French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy (1862‒1918) reacted successfully to the Impressionist movement in painting twenty years later. He wrote many short piano pieces that hold a permanent place in the concert repertoire including the four-movement Suite bergamasque. The popular third movement Clair de lune (Moonlight) has become one of the most famous pieces in all of music history. Debussy borrowed the title from a poem by Paul Verlaine. The orchestration of Clair de lune is not by Debussy, however, but by his friend André Caplet (1878‒1925), who also created beautiful orchestrations of other music by Debussy: The Children’s Corner and Pagodas. Clair de lune stands out for its peculiarly dreamy, even mystical atmosphere.

Gabriel’s Oboe, the famous solo from Roland Joffé’s film The Mission (1986), is a masterpiece by Ennio Morricone (1928‒2020), a giant of film music. The story is set in the mid-18th century against the backdrop of the conflict between Spain and Portugal over domination of South America. Father Gabriel, a Spanish Jesuit played masterfully by Jeremy Irons, is sent into the jungle of Paraguay to convert members of the native Guaraní tribe to Christianity. Not knowing the language, he tries to establish contact with them by playing the oboe. The chief, who alone has any idea of the consequences of the foreigners’ arrival, breaks his oboe and sends him off to be killed, but the other natives, fascinated by the music, choose to let him live among them. Father Gabriel builds a thriving Catholic mission, and the natives sincerely accept the new faith. All is well until 1750, when Spain and Portugal sign a treaty on the redistribution of spheres of influence. The Portuguese bring new plans for modern slavery and a categorical command for abolition of the mission. This can only end tragically; the mission defends itself, but everything is destroyed, the heroes dies, and a handful of natives flee back to the jungle. The question as to whether they would have been better off having never encountered European culture at all remains unanswered. Morricone masterfully highlights the film’s breathtaking visuals with shots of the wilderness and of the thundering Iguaçu Falls.

Danzón No. 2 by the Mexican composer Artur Márquez (*1950) is one of the most popular and most frequently performed Mexican contemporary compositions. It is celebrated as a symbol of Mexican culture and is regarded as a second, unofficial national anthem. Danzón is an old salon dance style of Cuban origin, which came to the dance halls of Mexico City by way of the port city Veracruz. It combines lightness with dignity as well as passionate sensuality. Márquez’s Danzón No. 2 (1994) gained worldwide popularity when the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela led by Gustav Dudamel included it on programmes on their 2007 European and American tour.

The German trumpet player Oskar Böhme (1870‒1938) graduated from trumpet and composition studies at the conservatoire in Leipzig. At the age of 27 he moved to Tsarist Russia, where he played cornet in the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg until the Bolshevik Revolution, then he taught trumpet playing at the Central Academy of Music. In 1936, he was exiled to faraway Orenburg during Stalin’s Great Purge, then he was arrested two years later, sentenced to death in a show trial, and executed by members of the NKVD as one of the last victims of that wave of terror. His compositions, mostly in this spirit of Romanticism, are devoted to the trumpet, including the very brilliant Tarantella “La Napolitaine”, Op. 25. The lively scherzo evokes the familiar Italian folk dance in 6/8 time; the dance’s origins are tied to a myth about tarantula bites, for which dancing was said to be a cure! The Leipzig publisher Zimmermann issued the first printed edition of the piece in 1903.

Pietro Mascagni (1863‒1945) is best known for his one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana (1890), the first of his 15 operatic works. From its premiere at Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, it was clear that the naturalistic storytelling and the setting in the Sicilian countryside were reflections of the new operatic trend known as verismo, with its characteristic search for truthful realism (the Italian word verità means ‘truth’). The lovely Intermezzo sinfonico from the opera lives a life of its own, thriving on the concert stage.

Candide, the third Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein (1918‒1990) after West Side Story and Peter Pan, was premiered on 1 December 1956. The show closed after a run of just 73 performances, a failure by Broadway’s standards. Supposedly at fault was Lillian Hellmann’s libretto, which was unable to capture fully the satirical double entendres and caustic irony of Voltaire’s original. There followed decades of revisions and the emergence of an operatic version, for which Bernstein created new numbers. However, the work’s revisions were hindered by a dispute with the librettist, who disallowed changes to the text for the new versions. Therefore, for the final version of Candide, Richard Wilbur furnished a new libretto with contributions by Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim.

Unlike the musical, Bernstein’s overture to Candide enjoyed immediate popularity, and at the turn of the century it was one of the most frequently played contemporary works on a worldwide scale. The piece begins with a comedic fanfare based on the interval of the minor seventh followed by a major second, a kind of motto for Candide as a whole. This is followed by a flurry of musical motifs, interspersed with the contrasting lyrical secondary theme of the duet “Oh, Happy We.” The entire section is repeated with different orchestration, and the overture concludes with a brilliant coda derived from the ending of the aria “Glitter and Be Gay”.

When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, the New York Philharmonic played the overture to Candide without a conductor at a memorial concert for their conductor laureate. That performance practice has become a tradition maintained to this day.