No. 1963 Subscription (Program C)

A long-lived and prolific composer, Strauss particularly excelled in any programmatic music. And the symphonic poem, considered an invention by Franz Liszt, was a top-rated orchestral genre among Romantics like Strauss to fully explore possibilities of musical narrativity and descriptiveness without being bound to Classical strict forms.
Strauss was still in his mid-twenties when he wrote the symphonic poem Don Juan based upon a poem by Nikolaus Lenau about this legendary womanizer of Spanish origin. We are amazed at how exactly and brilliantly the composer’s pen portrays the fearless, passionate libertine with an opening avalanche of dashing and leaping melodies. These primary themes of Don Juan would recur in this flexible sonata-form music. The following materials describe the hero's unsatisfied pursuit of the ideal womankind, such as the violin solo evoking a lady he encounters and then the oboe solo hinting his love affair with another. After a dramatic silence, the gloomy E-minor ending suggests that he meets his fate despairingly.
[Kumiko Nishi]

Strauss' long musical journey was not stylistically constant. Late-Romantic Don Juan (1888) brought him a reputation, before he joined the avant-garde with sensational operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1908) propelling musical dissonance. Soon after, he broke off from this radicalism to stay with reactionary late-Romanticism for the rest of his career.
Written in his latest years in 1945, the Oboe Concerto was Strauss' first concerto for the instrument, and he had written only three concertos before that. The reason that he came to create one of the important oboe concertos alongside Mozart’s was his encounter with an American. This soldier, who was a professional oboist in peacetime, visited Strauss just after World War II and asked him whether he had ever thought of writing an oboe concerto.
Inspired by the question, he began to sketch one after a while.
This Concerto is often referred to be Mozartian in virtue of its graceful melodies, transparent orchestration and Classical structure. The three movements are performed without pause, which makes this pastoral but technically and physically difficult piece more demanding for the oboist. It begins with cellos introducing a wiggling four-note melody which is a key motif of the first movement. The dreamy slow movement ends with the oboe cadenza on the strings' pizzicatos. The merry finale in duple time has a short cadenza followed by a gracious section in waltz time.
[Kumiko Nishi]

Der Rosenkavalier was a turning point in Strauss’ stylistic transition. As opposed to the grisly, almost atonal predecessor Elektra, it was viewed as a Mozartian comedy by the composer and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This, so to say, “The Marriage of Figaro wearing the late-Romantic music” incited contemporary critics to accuse Strauss of regression, while its 1911 premiere was an unexampled success among the audience.
The opera is set in 18th-century Vienna. The title refers to an imaginary noble custom for a suitor to send a messenger with a silver rose to the bride-to-be. The center of the bittersweet story is Marschallin, a marshal’s wife, having an affair with the teenage Count Octavian. He, by recommendation of his mistress, becomes a Rose Cavalier for Baron Ochs and presents the rose to beautiful young Sophie. Octavian and Sophie fall in love with each other at first sight. Marschallin, heartbroken, has the grace to accept the reality.
The orchestral suite performed today is the one prepared anonymously authorized by Strauss himself for its 1945 publication. Without any break, it appears to be a symphonic poem freely treating some highlights and waltzes from the original. The suite starts with a famous lovemaking part from the opera with the youthful ascending theme of Octavian (horns) and the refined descending theme of Marschallin (strings) entangled. Later we hear the recuring glittering motif of the silver rose played mainly by flutes, harps and celesta.
[Kumiko Nishi]