No. 2051 Subscription (Program A)

St. Petersburg-born Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) mostly lived as a citizen of the Soviet Union where the communist regime utilized every art form as a vehicle for their propaganda. Especially during Stalin’s era (1924–1953), many artists who didn’t meet the official Soviet style called “Socialist realism” put their lives and careers in peril.
Shostakovich was subjected to the two infamous cultural purges in 1936 and 1948. He managed to “rehabilitate” himself writing propagandistic or non-modernist works to please the authorities. However, he openly hid politically rebellious messages in his music, while stashing several improper or artistically ambitious works “in his desk drawer” to avoid the government officials’ wrath.
One of his works put in his drawer is the Violin Concerto No. 1 penned between July 1947 and March 1948. Zhdanov, Stalin’s right-hand person, denounced Shostakovich and other Soviet composers for their modernist style in February 1948, which prevented the concerto from being made public. In 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, the first performance was given in Leningrad by David Oistrakh, the legendary Soviet violinist who inspired Shostakovich to compose both of his Violin Concertos Nos. 1–2 (1948/1967) and Violin Sonata (1968).
No. 1 is not in the conventional three-movement concerto form and has instead four independent movements. The dismal opening, Nocturne in A minor, is the only movement where a celesta and harps are called for. The violin solo’s extended chromatic monologue gives midway a theme equally utilizing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, foretelling Shostakovich’s subsequent adoption of the avant-garde twelve-tone technique. Scherzo has some themes derived from the famous DSCH motif consisting of four notes D–E-flat–C–B (D–Es–C–H in German notation) after the German transliteration of his name (D. SCHostakowitsch). This motif will resound in the composer’s Symphony No. 10 which is supposedly linked with Stalin. The third movement is a Passacaglia, a form typical of the Baroque era of continuous variation on a given theme (usually a bass line). Here the theme is announced solemnly by low strings and timpani at the start. The grand cadenza (a highly virtuosic violin solo without orchestra) leads without pause to the frenzied Burleske in A minor.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Late-Romantic Viennese composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942) had long been overshadowed by his contemporaries who were active in Vienna at the turn of the century, such as Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). However, Zemlinsky’s works including the Lyric Symphony (1923) have been performed more and more frequently in later days. Overall, his chromatically-expanded harmonic style follows Mahler and Richard Strauss without parting from the traditional tonal language. Unlike Schönberg, Zemlinsky’s composition pupil and brother-in-law (his sister married Schönberg in 1901), he never adopted the novel twelve-tone technique.
Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), a fantasy for large orchestra written in 1902–1903, is also Zemlinsky’s representative work. It was premiered at a concert in Vienna in 1905 where Schönberg’s Pelleas und Melisande was also first heard publicly. The Mermaid enjoyed a few more performances before Zemlinsky withdrew it. He then left the score of the first part in Vienna and brought only the second and third parts along when he fled to the US as a Jewish exile in 1938. It was four decades after his passing in New York, that the work was rescued from oblivion by a revival performance, thanks to researchers who had gathered the separate manuscripts together.
The Mermaid is after the fairy tale The Little Mermaid by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). Many commentators have associated the choice of this world-famous love triangle story with the composer’s broken heart. Indeed, Zemlinsky was in love with his composition pupil, young and brilliant Alma Schindler (1879–1964) who got engaged to Mahler in 1901 and married him the next year.
The first part of The Mermaid begins with the description of unlit ocean floor: over a drone A note, contrabasses and a harp introduce the ascending theme before winds give the undulated theme, both of which will recur throughout the piece as unifying elements. Then a violin solo presents the heroine’s theme, probably after R. Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) (1898) that Zemlinsky said to have studied with absorbed interest. The subsequent music depicts a stormy sea, a shipwreck and the Mermaid rescuing the Prince. The scherzo-like middle part depicts a ball held in the underwater kingdom (we hear a splendid waltz) and the Mermaid trading her voice for a pair of legs at the Sea Witch’s. The final part, headed “mit schmerzvollem Ausdruck (with sorrowful expression)”, evokes ambivalent feelings and then despair of the mute heroine, now in human shape, at the castle of the Prince who decides to marry a neighboring princess. A quiet mournful music hints the Mermaid’s self-sacrificing death after refraining from taking the Prince’s life. The ethereal ending with a marked key shift from dark A minor to luminous E-flat major, suggests the Mermaid’s ascent to heaven and acquiring of an immortal soul.

[Kumiko Nishi]