Subscription Concerts 2024-2025Program A
No. 2020 Subscription (Program A)

Born to Swiss parents in northern France, Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) studied music in German-speaking Zurich, Switzerland, and in Paris. Together with Poulenc (1899–1963) and others, young Honegger formed in 1916 “Les Six (The Six),” the Parisian avant-garde group worshiping Satie’s simple language against all sorts of German late-Romantic excess. Nevertheless, Honegger’s individual taste and style partly due to his dual Swiss-French identity made him stand out as unique: he professed his admiration for Wagner – an enemy of “Les Six”–, besides owing a great deal to Richard Strauss and, above all, J. S. Bach.
Honegger wrote his Symphony No. 3 in 1945–1946 immediately after World War II, which seems to be related to the title Symphony Liturgique (Liturgical) and the names he gave to each movement after the Catholic Mass for the Dead and a Psalm. The Symphony, featuring “three characters who are real or symbolic: misfortune, happiness and man” (the composer’s words), opens with the barbaric first movement Dies irae (Day of Wrath) describing “the explosion of strength and of hate.” The slow middle movement De profundis clamavi (From the Depth I Called to Thee) is sorrowfully meditative. The final Dona nobis pacem (Give Us Peace) has the brutal march and then the serene Adagio section. Each of the three movements symbolically ends with the same melody in three different characters, which evokes the hopeful bird song from Honegger’s dramatic oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake 1935).

[Kumiko Nishi]

In Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)’s lifetime, the Viennese musical world was split into two camps: simply put, the conservatives worshiping Brahms’ classicism against the progressives adoring the “future music” of Wagner. Brahms’ approaches were in all truth forward-looking, however, it is true that he shaped his original voice by absorbing Classical and Baroque heritages, especially Beethoven’s and J. S. Bach’s.
While the Classical symphony as genre was on its last legs after Beethoven (and Schubert), Brahms in the Romantic era gave his four answers, each one different. With the Fourth completed in 1885 when he was 52, he looks back the most at the past – the Baroque and even earlier eras – adopting the Beethovenian Classical four-movement form. Interestingly, the Fourth has the unhappiest ending among all Brahms’ symphonies, starting and culminating in a minor key against the example set by Beethoven whose Fifth (Destiny) attains the victorious major denouement through minor darkness.
The sonata movement in E minor – a main tonality rarely chosen for symphonies in general – begins Brahms’ Fourth. He minutely builds the whole movement out of the opening descending two-note motif. The intermittent “heavily sighing” first theme given by the violins at the outset begins to establish this. Cellos and horns reveal the second theme over staccato accompaniment which has often been likened to the tango. The next slow movement starts solemnly with the horns’ melody in a medieval church mode. The gusty third movement is the first scherzo Brahms wrote for the genre of the symphony following Beethoven, however, here Brahms surprises us doubly with his duple-time scherzo in sonata form. The finale is a colossal passacaglia, a form typical of the Baroque era of continuous variation on a given theme (usually a bass line). At the start, the winds announce in a high range the eight-chord theme which is said to be inspired by J. S. Bach’s Cantata BWV150 For Thee, O Lord, I long. Thereafter come thirty-two variations and a coda where Brahms’ masterly symphony ceases on a fervent E-minor chord.

[Kumiko Nishi]