PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 IN C MINOR, OP. 18 – Sergei Rachmaninoff
BORN: April 1, 1873. Semyonovo, district of Starorusky, Russia
DIED: March 28, 1943. Beverly Hills, CA
COMPOSED: Using some material that goes back to the early 1890s, Rachmaninoff wrote the second and third movements of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in the fall of 1900 and completed the first movement on May 4, 1901
WORLD PREMIERE: November 9, 1901. Rachmaninoff was soloist with his teacher and first cousin Alexander Siloti conducting in Moscow
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, and strings
THE BACKSTORY: Rachmaninoff must have known how strong and original a work his First Symphony was. Nonetheless he was always subject to depression, and following the work’s awful premiere, he quickly found himself unable to face the sight of blank manuscript paper. He grew despondent. The longer his composer’s voice was silent the worse he felt; the worse he felt the more impossible the idea of composing.
At the head of the first page of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto stands the simple dedication, “À Monsieur N. Dahl.” Monsieur Dahl was actually Dr. Nicolai Dahl, an internist who had been studying hypnosis. Dahl was also an excellent violist and cellist and founder of his own string quartet. Rachmaninoff began daily visits to him in January 1900. The first aim was to improve the composer’s sleep and appetite. The larger goal was to enable him to compose a piano concerto. Dr. Dahl’s treatment, a mixture of hypnotic suggestion (“You will begin your concerto . . . you will work with great facility . . . the concerto will be excellent. . :”) and cultured conversation, did its work. By April, Rachmaninoff felt well enough to travel to the Crimea and on to Italy. When he returned home, he brought with him sketches for the new piano concerto. Five days before the premiere in November 1901, he suffered a moment of panic and was convinced he had produced a totally incompetent piece of work, but the tempestuous success he enjoyed at the premiere seems to have convinced him otherwise.
THE MUSIC: The Second Piano Concerto seems to unfold effortlessly, and that is something new in Rachmaninoff’s music. He begins magnificently, and with something so familiar that we come perilously close to taking it for granted, with a series of piano chords in crescendo. The gathering harmonic tension and dynamic force constitute a powerful springboard for the move into the home chord of C minor. Once there, the strings with clarinet initiate a plain but intensely expressive melody. Nowhere is the pianist so often an ensemble partner and so rarely a soloist aggressively in the foreground as in this first movement. The initial impulse plays itself out in one grand, tightly organized paragraph and it is only then that the orchestra falls silent and the pianist steps forward as a vocal soloist in the grand Romantic manner.
Rachmaninoff constructs a bridge passage into the second movement. Again the pianist is at first the accompanist, briefly to the flute, at greater length to the clarinet. Throughout the movement the relationship between piano and orchestra is imagined and worked out with great delicacy. There is something touching about the way the piano shyly inserts just six notes of melody between the first two phrases of the clarinet, the roles of piano and orchestra being reversed later in the movement. A quicker interlude functions as a token scherzo. This interlude spills into a splash of cadenza, and for just five notes a pair of flutes eases the music back into softly swaying arpeggios.
Rachmaninoff again makes a bridge into the finale, beginning with distant, rather conspiratorial march music, then working his way around to the piano’s assertive entrance. The march music is now determined and vigorous, and Rachmaninoff finds for contrast the most famous of his big tunes. It all moves to a rattling bring-down-the-house conclusion. – program notes by Michael Steinberg
George Li, Piano
Praised by The Washington Post for combining “staggering technical prowess, a sense of command, and depth of expression,” pianist George Li possesses brilliant virtuosity and effortless grace far beyond his years. Since winning the Silver Medal at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition and being named the recipient of the 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Li has rapidly established a major international reputation as he performs regularly with some of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, such as Gustavo Dudamel, James Gaffigan, Valery Gergiev, Gustavo Gimeno, Manfred Honeck, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko, David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, Yuri Temirkanov, Vladimir Spivakov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Long Yu, and Xian Zhang.
George Li gave his first public performance at Boston’s Steinert Hall at the age of 10. In 2011, he performed for President Obama at the White House in an evening honoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Among George Li’s many prizes and awards, he was the First Prize winner of the 2010 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the inaugural Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, and the Grand Prix Animato, as well as a recipient of the 2012 Gilmore Young Artist Award and the 2018 Arthur Waser Prize.
George is an exclusive Warner Classics recording artist. His debut album, “Live at Mariinsky,” which was recorded live at the Mariinsky Concert Hall, won an Opus Klassik award for Soloist Recording of the Year in 2018. His second recording for the label features Liszt solo works and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which was recorded live with Vasily Petrenko and the London Philharmonic, and released in October 2019.
George began his piano studies at age 4 with Dorothy Shi, before continuing with Wha Kyung Byun at New England Conservatory beginning at age 12. In 2019, he completed the Harvard/New England Conservatory dual degree program, with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a Master’s degree in Music. He is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at the New England Conservatory. When not playing piano, George is an avid reader and photographer, as well as a sports fanatic.
https://www.georgelipianist.com/
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SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN E MINOR, OPUS 64 – Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
BORN: May 7, 1840. Votkinsk, district of Viatka, Russia
DIED: November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia
COMPOSED: 1888
WORLD PREMIERE: November 17, 1888 in Saint Petersburg, Russia by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic conducted by Tchaikovsky
INSTRUMENTATION: 3 flutes with 3rd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets (doubled), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings
THE BACKSTORY: Tchaikovsky approached his Fifth Symphony from a position of extreme self-doubt, nearly always his posture vis-à-vis his incipient creations. In May 1888, he confessed in a letter to his brother, Modest, that he feared his imagination had dried up, that he had nothing more to express in music. Still, there was a glimmer of hope: “I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony.”
Tchaikovsky was spending the summer of 1888 at a vacation residence he had built on a forested hillside at Frolovskoe, not a long trip from his home base in Moscow. The idyllic locale proved conducive to inspiration and apparently played a major role in helping him conquer his demons long enough to complete this symphony, which he did in four months. Tchaikovsky made a habit of keeping his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, informed about his compositions through detailed letters, and thanks to this ongoing correspondence we have a good deal of information about how the Fifth Symphony progressed during that summer. Tchaikovsky had met Mme. von Meck a dozen years earlier. In fact he hadn’t exactly “met” her, since an eccentric stipulation of her philanthropy was that they should avoid personal contact. Tchaikovsky’s labor on the symphony was already well along when he broached the subject with Mme. von Meck, in a letter on June 22: “I shall work my hardest. I am exceedingly anxious to prove to myself, as to others, that I am not played out as a composer. Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony? The beginning was difficult, but now inspiration seems to have come. We shall see. . . .”
His correspondence on the subject brims with allusions to the emotional background to this piece, which involved resignation to fate, the designs of providence, murmurs of doubt, and similarly dark thoughts.
Critics blasted the symphony at its premiere, due in part to the composer’s limited skill on the podium; and yet the audience was enthusiastic. Tchaikovsky, true to type, decided the critics must be right. In December he wrote to von Meck,
Having played my Symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other works of mine, and that the Symphony itself will never please the public.
Elsewhere he wrote of his Fifth Symphony, “the organic sequence fails, and a skillful join has to be made. . . . I cannot complain of lack of inventive power, but I have always suffered from want of skill in the management of form.”
These comments reveal considerable self-awareness; one might say that Tchaikovsky was wrong, but for all the right reasons. The work’s orchestral palette is indeed unusually colorful (despite the fact that the composer employs an essentially Classical orchestra of modest proportions). The composer was quite on target about “the management of form” being his weak suit; and, indeed, the Fifth Symphony may be viewed as something of a patchwork—the more so when compared to the relatively tight symphony that preceded it eleven years earlier. And if Tchaikovsky was embarrassed by the degree of overt sentiment he reached in the Fifth Symphony, it still fell short of the emotional frontiers he would cross in his Sixth.
THE MUSIC: The Fifth Symphony adheres to the classic four-movement form, but the movements are unified to some degree through common reference to a “motto theme,” a sort of Berliozian idée fixe announced by the somber clarinets at the outset. Most commentators are happy to agree that this represents the idea of Fate to which Tchaikovsky referred in his prose sketch of April 1888. It will reappear often in this symphony, sometimes reworked considerably, and it certainly defines the bleak tone that governs much of the proceedings. And yet, not everything is bleak. Shafts of sunlight often cut through the shadows: hopeful secondary melodies, orchestration of illuminating brightness, rhythmic vivacity and variety, passages of balletic grace.
“If Beethoven’s Fifth is Fate knocking at the door,” wrote a commentator when the piece was new, “Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is Fate trying to get out.” It nearly does so in a journey that threatens to culminate in a series of climactic B major chords. But notwithstanding the frequent interruption of audience applause at that point, the adventure continues to a conclusion that is to some extent ambiguous: four closing E major chords that we may hear as triumphant but may just as easily sound ominous. – program notes by James M. Keller, Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic