Subscription Concerts 2023-2024Program A
No. 2004 Subscription (Program A)

Along with his father (1804–1849) of the same name, Johann Strauss II represents the famous Austrian musical family which founded the basis of the Viennese waltz and led it to its heyday. Known today as “The Waltz King,” Strauss II went into music despite his father’s opposition to be a successful composer, conductor and violinist. The Younger wrote around 170 waltzes of great refinement including An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) (1867) besides over fifteen operettas of which the best known is Die Fledermaus (The Flittermouse)(1874).
Strauss II left us approximately 120 polkas, too. This duple-meter dance of Bohemian origin was introduced to Vienna in the late 1830s before becoming a popular ballroom dance around Europe. Op. 336 performed today is a fine example of a “polka française” (French polka) which is elegant in character and slower in tempo in contrast to “polka schnell” (quick polka). Op. 336 is pleasantly naturalistic with whistles evocating the twitter of cuckoos and other birds.
The fact that Op. 336 was first performed in 1869 in Russia as Im Pawlowsk Walde (In the Pavlovsk Woods) is not irrelevant to the rest of today’s program. Nearly every year from 1856 to 1869, Strauss II was invited by a Russian railway company to stay in the summer retreat Pavlovsk (near St. Petersburg) to conduct the summer concert season. For the audience of his birthplace, the composer later renamed it In Krapfen’s Woods after an area of the Vienna Woods.

[Kumiko Nishi]

The St. Petersburg-born composer Shostakovich is deemed to be a preeminent symphonist with his fifteen tours de force, not forgetting being an important contributor to chamber music. Theatrical music (operas, ballets, film scores and incidental music works), however, occupies quite a wide space in his oeuvre. Having lost his father, the teenage composer started to gain his bread as a silent-movie pianist in 1924. Even after the well-received premieres in 1926–1927 of his first two symphonies, he, still in need, penned a number of theatrical works. This continued over his entire life to bring about, for instance, as many as thirty-five film scores total.
The Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1 consists of eight delectable gems picked from Shostakovich’s film and stage scores. Assembled by an anonymous person (or possibly by Shostakovich himself) around the mid-1950s, this set had been erroneously identified with the Jazz Suite No. 2 until recent years. As the correct title hints, the orchestral formation including a guitar, an accordion and saxophones sticks out of the classical frame. After jaunty March from the 1941 Soviet movie The Adventures of Korzinkina, Lyrical Waltz gives an impressive accordion solo in the central section. Probably the composer’s most popular piece today, Waltz II is heard in the Soviet movie The First Echelon (1956) and Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999): the haunting melody first-sung by a saxophone will be roared by a trombone towards the end to bolster the melancholic feeling up.

[Kumiko Nishi]

All the fifteen symphonies Shostakovich left us were more or less at the mercy of the time. Interestingly enough, No. 8 (1943) and No. 9 (1945) which incurred the Soviet authorities’ wrath the most among all his symphonies are purely instrumental. Even No. 5 (1937), No. 11 The Year 1905 (1957) and No. 12 The Year 1917 (1961) understood by the government to “rehabilitate” the composer, do not have any sung-words.
No. 13 (1962) is Shostakovich’s first vocal symphony since propagandistic No. 2 (1927) and No. 3 (1929) both requiring a chorus at the close. Moreover, No. 13, a choral symphony for an exceptional formation (bass soloist, bass chorus and orchestra), is virtually sung throughout like Mahler’s No. 8.
Although a product of the post-Stalin era, namely from the Thaw period, No. 13 was nevertheless a highly risky work because of the politically provocative texts by the young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933–2017). The poem Babi Yar used for the first movement, above all, denounces the anti-Semitism still found everywhere, a taboo subject for the USSR. (Babi Yar is a ravine located on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine where the Nazis massacred Jews in 1941.) The symphony vexed Nikita Khrushchev and his henchmen who attempted to sabotage the 1962 premiere in Moscow.
The tense first movement is haunted by ill-omened bell tolls. The chorus enters singing “There is no monument over Babi Yar. / The steep ravine is like a coarse tombstone.” The second movement Humor is a polka-style scherzo mocking at “Czars, kings, emperors, / potentates of the whole earth” as they “were unable to command humor.” The following three movements are performed seamlessly: In the Store describes Soviet women patiently standing in a queue in the severe cold, while Fears, opened by a tam-tam (gong) clanging, decries “new fears” replacing fears of bygone (Stalinist) days. Waltz-style A Career praises Galileo Galilei for having been brave enough to turn his back to the earthly success in life, before whispering the symphony’s conclusion with a bell tolling.

[Kumiko Nishi]