Subscription Concerts 2024-2025Program B
No. 2035 Subscription (Program B)

Music historians have dubbed Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) “The Chameleon,” as the Russia-born composer drastically changed styles several times. On top, he was always ahead of the time opening a new era in classical music history.
Initially, Stravinsky composed the ballet score Petrushka in Europe before World WarI for Sergei Diaghilev’s dance company, Ballets Russes. Premiered in 1911, it stunned Paris’ discerning audience with its modernist approaches. The work stylistically belongs to Stravinsky’s early “primitivistic” period alongside his ballet scores The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913).
The plot of Petrushka is set at a festive fair during Russian Mardi Gras. Inspired by the “Commedia dell’arte,” an Italian traditional comedy with masked performers, it tells the love triangle story of three theater puppets (Petrushka, The Ballerina and The Moore) awakened by The Magician (or The Charlatan). Petrushka, a weak clown-puppet made of straw, tried to court The Ballerina unsuccessfully. He ends up being brutally killed by his handsome rival in love in front of the fair crowd, before reappearing as a ghost above the puppet theater. A former pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), Stravinsky borrowed several Russian folk songs for the vivid, avant-garde score. The most well-known features are the utilization of the recurrent, dissonant “Petrushka chord” (combining the two major triads of C major and F-sharp major) as well as a prominent role given to a piano.
The 1947 revised version of Petrushka was prepared when Stravinsky was in his mid-sixties, after he took US citizenship in 1945. Back in 1939, the outbreak of World War II had made him decide to move from Europe to America, the cosmopolitan composer’s last base. Compared to the original 1911 version, the 1947 one for a smaller orchestra sounds thinner and less sentimental but not without color. We can clearly hear the residue of musical neo-classicism, the movement that Stravinsky himself originated in 1920 to revive styles and aesthetics of the past in a modern light.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) is one of the most notable English composers during the 20th century, alongside his seniors Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). Besides his major contribution to the English opera as represented by his Peter Grimes (1945), Britten exhibited a great talent in different instrumental and vocal genres writing masterworks such as The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945) and War Requiem (1962).
Britten was born in a port town in Suffolk facing the North Sea in 1913, the year when Stravinsky’s ground-breaking ballet score The Rite of Spring was premiered to alter the course of music history. Having said that, Britten, a precocious composer, would keep his distance from avant-garde and experimental pursuits unlike Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and John Cage (1912–1992). He instead updated the conventional tonal language relying often on traditional forms, to leave us truly original works.
A prime example of Britten’s early period, the Piano Concerto Op. 13 was written in 1938 in his mid-twenties and premiered the same year by himself as the soloist at the BBC Proms (The original third movement Recitative and Aria was replaced with Impromptu in 1945). Both in style and form, the concerto belongs to the above-mentioned Stravinskian neo-classicism, with the four movements presumably modeled after the dance suite from the Baroque era.
The radiant opening movement with a rapid motoric burst of notes, Toccata, reminds us of compositions by another neo-classicist Francis Poulenc (1899–1963). The nostalgically gloomy second movement, Waltz, is often likened to a tribute to the has-been Viennese waltz. The slow third movement, Impromptu, is a passacaglia, a form typical of the Baroque era of continuous variation on a given theme (usually a bass line): here Britten lets the piano give the theme solemnly at the start. Then without pause, begins the anxious finale, March, which is in a way, the most fundamental form of dance. Towards the end, the first movement’s bravura toccata is recalled in preparation for the wild finish.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Born in Imperial Russia (today in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine), Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) lived overseas for eighteen years following the Bolshevik Revolution. He left his home in 1918 by permission of the Soviet authorities and, avoiding western disasters of war, headed east for America via Vladivostok and Tokyo. During this voyage, he prepared the libretto for his opera based on The Love for Three Oranges by the Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). The opera would be first-staged in Chicago in 1921, while Prokofiev arranged the symphonic suite in 1919 and revised it in 1924. Abundant in satiric effects, the music shows his earlier ferocious modernism at times.
In the eccentric plot, everyone tries in vain to make the hypochondriac Prince laugh, but he does so accidentally during a party seeing the Witch falling over. Furious, she puts a curse on him so he falls in love with three oranges that he goes in search of. The first two Princesses coming out of the enormous oranges die of thirst. The Prince marries the third Princess and expels the villains from the Kingdom. The best-known of the suite, the blatant III March is from the scene where the sick Prince is forcibly carried from his bedroom to the party. At the IV Scherzo, a rhythm of the Italian folk dance tarantella accompanies the hero’s feverish hunt for the oranges in the desert.

[Kumiko Nishi]