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Beethoven & Beyond
The lyricism of Borodin; the power of Beethoven; and a Chinese folk epic set for violin and orchestra salute our Sister City from across the pacific--Changchun, China.
Alexander Borodin –
Symphony no. 3, "The Unfinished"
Chen/He –
Butterfly Lovers Concerto
Ludwig van Beethoven –
Symphony no. 8
Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 8:00 p.m.
Chrysler Theatre
Instrumentally Speaking – pre-concert talk at 7:00 p.m. inside the Chrysler Theatre
Tickets from $13!
John Morris Russell, Conductor
Min Xie, Violin
Symphony no. 3, "The Unfinished"
Alexander Borodin
B. November 12, 1833, St. Petersburg
D. February 27, 1887, St. Petersburg
By Dr. Ed Kovarik
Alexander Borodin, the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, was trained as a medical doctor and research chemist, and he made a comfortable living as a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine (where he had studied) and later at the Women’s Academy of Medicine (which he helped create). From childhood he was largely self-taught in music, learning to play piano, flute and cello; he also composed a certain amount of chamber music and short piano pieces.
In his late twenties (1862) he met Balakirev, four years his junior but already spiritual leader of the group of Russian composers who came to be known as the “Mighty Five.” Balakirev counselled him to write in large forms, and thus encouraged he managed eventually to produce two symphonies and an opera. Each was a long time in coming, however, since Borodin could write only in those few precious moments stolen from his other duties, or as he said—only half-joking—when he was too sick to do anything else.
Chen Gang
B. 1935,
He Zhanhao
B. 1933,
The Butterfly Lovers' Violin Concerto (Chinese: 梁祝小提琴协奏曲) is one of the most famous works of Chinese music and certainly one of the most famous outside of China. It is an orchestral adaptation of an ancient legend, the Butterfly Lovers. Written for the western style orchestra, it features a solo violin played using some Chinese techniques.
The Butterfly Lovers' Violin Concerto was written in 1959 by two Chinese composers, Chen Gang (陈钢) and He Zhanhao (何占豪), while they were students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The music did not acquire popularity before the late 1970s, when China loosened its restrictions after the Cultural Revolution. Once released from censorship, it became an embodiment of China in transition. The work is a common feature in figure skating and in concert halls worldwide. This concerto is now often performed with Chinese instruments playing the violin part, the most common being Erhu, Pipa and Liuqin. In such cases the soloist is often accompanied by an orchestra consisting of Chinese instruments.
He Zhanhao is more widely credited for the composition of the concerto. However, his main contribution was the famous opening theme while most of the development was in fact written by Chen Gang.
The concerto is in one movement, but is broken into distinct sections. Each tells a different part of the story of the Butterfly Lovers. Some of the melodies come from the Chinese Opera of the same name or from traditional Chinese folk songs. The solo violin of the concerto is symbolic of Zhu Yingtai, the story's protagonist, and the cello part is symbolic of Liang Shanbo, her lover.
The concerto begins with a flute and then enters into a simple melody played by the solo violinist. This melody comes from a Chinese folk song of the yellow river, and tells the story of Zhu Yingtai's childhood. The solo violin is accompanied by a harp and other elements of the orchestra.
Next, the concerto tells of Zhu Yingtai's disguising herself as a man and her journey to Hangzhou to attend school. The solo violin plays a complex and fast melody floating above the rest of the orchestra. When Zhu arrives she meets Liang Shanbo, a fellow student. The two spend three years together as good friends. Zhu falls in love with Liang, but cannot express her feelings without revealing her identity as a woman.
When both the students must return home, Zhu invites Liang to visit her family and to court her sister. He doesn't know that Zhu is really inviting him to marry her. Liang promises to see Zhu again, but Liang waits before doing so. When Liang arrives, he sees Zhu and realizes that she is a woman, and they fall in love. The solo violin and cello parts play a sad duet that is the most famous and powerful of the work.
The love duet between the two is replaced by anger as Liang learns that in his absence, Zhu has been betrothed to another. The two solo parts contrast the rest of the orchestra. Several melodies are used in this section, the orchestra plays loud and accented chords in between the softer cello and violin parts and the parts are often intertwined. Liang becomes sick and dies as the music replays the duet of their love. Zhu and the orchestra continue to play their contrasting parts. The section ends with the suicide of Zhu Yingtai as the solo violin plays an overarching high note. The lover's parts are overcome by a final orchestral section. In the legend, Liang's grave opens and Zhu throws herself into the chasm.
The lovers' themes return and the two lovers are magically transformed into butterflies.
Ludwig van Beethoven
B. Dec 16, 1770, Bonn, German
D
. Mar 26,1827, Vienna, Austria
This work premiered on February 27, 1814 at the Great Redoutensaal in Vienna. Beethoven was growing increasingly deaf at the time, led the premiere.
On several occasions Beethoven sketched two symphonies concurrently or presented pairs of them together on a program, tacitly inviting listeners to hear one work in the context of the other. The fact that his Second Symphony (1801-02) was premiered on a concert that also included his First (1800) encouraged audiences and critics to consider them that way; the critics certainly did, generally to the disadvantage of the Second, which they found its modernity problematic. We might also view the Second as linked chronologically to the Third (the Sinfonia eroica), since Beethoven did much work on both during the summer and fall of 1802 (though he wouldn’t complete the Third until 1804). The Fifth Symphony was already in progress in 1804, but Beethoven set it aside to pen his Fourth (among other works) and therefore didn’t finish the Fifth until early 1808. In those same months—late 1807 and early 1808—he also completed his Sixth (the Pastoral); and the Fifth and Sixth were premiered on the same program, masquerading as one another, in fact, because the printed program flipped the numerals, calling the Pastoral No. 5 and the C minor No. 6.
Each of Beethoven’s symphonies addresses its own musical issues—posing specific conceptual problems and then solving them—but when we consider these works as successions of dyads we may come to believe that they were truly intended as specific studies in contrast. The symphonic pairs seem always to stand as yin and yang to each other, with the result that Beethoven’s symphonies alternate between two categories of artistic impulses. Later in the nineteenth century the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, would delve into the aesthetic details of these artistic impulses (or Kunsttrieben, as he called them), which he traced to ancient Greece and the fragile balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Dionysus and Apollo were sons of Zeus, though by different mothers, and they came to typify diametrically opposed aesthetic ideals. Apollonian standards focused on clarity, balance, control, logic, and classically accepted modes of beauty, while Dionysian inclinations lay in the direction of excess, chaos, even the orgiastic and the irrational. A great artwork may well incorporate aspects of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but very often it is one or the other that defines the prevailing ethos overall. As applied to Beethoven’s symphonies, Dionysian characteristics tend to dominate the Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9—the more obviously extroverted and even violent of the bunch—while the cooler forces of Apollonian ideals inspire the Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, 6, and 8. You can learn a lot about the person sitting next to you by asking one simple question: “Evens or odds?”
As with Beethoven’s earlier symphonic pairs, so is the Eighth connected as a dyad to the Seventh. The Seventh was sketched in late 1811, completed in April 1812, and premiered in December 1813, in a concert honoring Austrian and German soldiers who had been wounded while battling Napoleon’s forces; and we have little trouble hearing its public, extroverted, Dionysian ebullience as a reflection of the composer’s own joy as the tide turned against that French Emperor, for whom he had held such hope and with whose imperialistic machinations he grew so disenchanted. But before the Seventh was completed Beethoven was already sketching his Eight Symphony, which he finished in the summer and fall of 1812. Again the yin and yang: where the Seventh is expansive to the point of overflowing, the Eighth is compact. Each of its movements is significantly shorter than the corresponding movement of the Seventh, and in performance the Eighth, which typically runs about 25-30 minutes, is perhaps two-thirds as long overall as the Seventh, which runs about 40. It is as if Beethoven let his fantasy run free in the Seventh but then, turning to a new page of his sketchbook, applied the brakes and reined himself in as severely as possible when plotting his Eighth. Tautness was not a new idea to Beethoven, to be sure; the opening movement of his Fifth Symphony stands to this day as one of the most economical pieces ever penned. But there we are aware of it, thrillingly so. It is music of that sort that surely inspired the description in Colin Wilson’s book Brandy of the Damned (1964), “He reminds me of a man driving the car with the handbrake on, but stubbornly refusing to stop, even though there is a strong smell of burning rubber.” The fun-loving Eighth seems a joyride in comparison.
In its externals, the Eighth Symphony may seem to retreat to an earlier time, and we may be tempted to wonder if Beethoven is picking up where he left off in his Second. But our composer never really turned back in his music—at least not in important scores like symphonies—and we will probably get closer to the truth if we imagine him conceiving something as vast as the immediately preceding symphonies and then editing it down to its essentials, packaging it as tightly as possible, and ending up with what looks at first glance like a Classical symphony. Surely it is to be numbered among the composer’s Apollonian works thanks to its sense of control and the tightness of its logic. But that does mean that it’s in any way stodgy. In fact, the Eighth Symphony is one of the great monuments of musical humor—not throwaway silliness, but rather large-boned, bluff, down-to-the-roots humor, the sort we find in the Falstaff of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, or Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony was premiered on a program that also included his Sixth and Seventh. Sir George Grove, founder of the music dictionaries that still carry his name, related: “It was not well received, much more applause being given to the Seventh Symphony, the Allegretto of which was re-demanded. The non-success of his pet work greatly discomposed Beethoven, but he bore it philosophically; and . . . he remarked, ‘That’s because it’s so much better than the other.’” Audiences were indeed slow to embrace it. In June 1827, three years after the more perplexing Ninth Symphony had been unleashed, we find the critic of Harmonicon in London still scratching his head about the Eighth, voicing an opinion that would reign for years among English critics. “Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony,” he wrote, “depends wholly on its last movement for what applause it obtains; the rest is eccentric without being amusing, and laborious without effect.” Even the perspicacious Hector Berlioz, an inveterate admirer of Beethoven’s symphonies, occasionally found himself at a loss in this one. Of the Tempo di Menuetto portion he opined, “To speak truly, this movement is but ordinary; and the antiquity of the form seems somehow to have stifled the composer’s thought.” And although he thoroughly enjoyed the finale, he found himself baffled when trying to analyze some structural harmonic business in which the theme pops up not just in its original F major but also in C-sharp, the enharmonic D-flat, and, of all things, F-sharp minor. “All this is very curious,” Berlioz concluded.
Con brio is precisely the right marking for the opening movement, which begins with a peal of musical laughter in 3/4 meter. The indefatigable music appreciationist Sigmund Spaeth, who in 1936 published lyrics to serve as mnemonic devices for the classic symphonies, found an opportunity to leap to the composer’s defense with his rhyme for this opening theme: “Beethoven still is great, in the symphony he numbered eight.” Hardly has Beethoven sounded it out than he drops it, turning, without more preparation than a bit of thumping, to a second theme, a lyrical tune in A major. This, too, proves to be short-lived, and the exposition reaches its end—back in F major—not long after it had begun. The development section is similarly concentrated and briefly stormy; and when Beethoven reaches the moment when the recapitulation arrives, he re-voices his opening music utterly, burying the principal theme in the bassoons, cellos, and double basses while the rest of the orchestra shrieks fortississimo above. That would count as a musical joke, and a clever one, but not everyone was amused. One later eminence who protested was Gustav Mahler, who, preparing to lead it as a conductor, rewrote this passage (via one of his infamous retuchen—“retouchings”) to make sure everybody would hear the structural moment clearly. Beethoven’s intention, I am quite sure, was that they wouldn’t.
The second movement (Allegretto scherzando) is the closest this symphony gets to a slow movement, and it’s not very close. If the constantly repeated staccato sixteenth-notes start to sound like “tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock,” there’s a reason for it. While he was composing this symphony Beethoven took a few minutes off to write a canon (WoO 162) for his friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who had constructed several of the ear-trumpets the almost-deaf composer used, in addition to inventing the odd instrument called the panharmonicon for which the composer’s Wellington’s Victory was conceived and, most notably, the metronome. Beethoven began his little canon with the text “ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta”—not great poetry but indeed metronomic. He clearly took pleasure in the effect, and here he reuses the tune, now downright cheeky when inserted into a lofty symphony. The principal theme seems hardly even a theme; it’s more like musical “puttering about,” but Beethoven shows that even such an offhanded idea offers the possibility of development. A ponderous second theme seems to have wandered in from a beer hall. Here and there Beethoven enjoys punctuating his phrases with a fortissimo shudder of rapidly repeated notes in the strings. The effect is that of an unruly uncle entertaining an entourage of youngsters and scaring the daylights out of them by gruffly shaking his jowls.
A decade earlier Beethoven had famously ended the Classical tradition of casting the third movement of a symphony as a minuet, superseding that practice through his signature rapid-fire scherzos. So in this unpredictable work he writes a minuet. On the whole it strikes a grand posture, but in truth it’s full of naughtiness. This surfaces not least in the cadential passages where the horns, trumpets, and timpani get comically “out of sync,” just like the village musicians had in the “Merry Gathering of Country Folk” section of the Pastoral Symphony. This joke, too, has been amended by many a conductor of the Eighth Symphony.
On to the finale (Allegro vivace), which is worked out with magnificent imagination. Again the theme seems negligible—here it’s little more than a cast-off melodic turn—but ends up generating an impressive structure, rather as if the Transamerica Pyramid had grown out of the merest curlicue. Much harmonic legerdemain ensues, as we know from Berlioz, but at least the ending has its feet firmly in the tonic key. Beethoven here bursts with jovial good spirits, and he composes as if abetted by a pile-driver. With the end in sight the orchestra hammers (or in some cases just taps) out 29 iterations of the F major triad; and then after a bit of further tomfoolery Beethoven reaches his final page and pounds the tonic into the ground through all of the concluding thirteen measures. For an Apollonian piece, this is quite a Dionysian ending.
Program notes by J. M. Keller
Min Xie
Min Xie joined the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in 2004 as an ECO Violinist. In addition to his role with the WSO, Xie is Concertmaster for the Jackson Symphony Orchestra in Michigan. During the summer, he also serves as a Visiting Professor at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music in China. As a professional musician, Min Xie has played solo recitals, chamber music concerts and in orchestras in China, Japan, Germany and the US. A CD with him as a soloist accompanied by Oriental National Symphony of Xi’an was released in 2008.
Min Xie has established his performing and teaching career with various music organizations and outstanding musicians. He started as a violinist for the Shaanxi Opera Troupe in China, where he gained a great deal of experience from playing operas. From 1983 to 1996, he was a violin faculty member at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music in which he was also Concertmaster of the Conservatory Symphony Orchestra. During that time, he was invited as a co-host in the provincial radio program to introduce classical music, composers and violin repertoires to the general audience. He was also actively involved with various solo and chamber music ensembles that led him to tours in major cities of China. Being the first violinist of the Xi’an String Quartet, China, Xie was invited to study at the Michigan State University as a visiting scholar under Dr. Walter Verdehr, distinguished professor of MSU. Between 1984 and 1986, the Xi’an String Quartet was trained by the Verdehr Trio as well as the Juilliard String Quartet.
In 1990, Xie performed in the 1st Pacific Music Festival (PMF) in Japan, founded by Leonard Bernstein. In 2004, Min Xie obtained the Doctoral of Musical Arts (DMA) degree from the Michigan State University. While pursuing his degree at MSU, Xie served as a violin instructor at its College of Music. In the meantime, he was Concertmaster of the MSU Symphony Orchestra and he gave chamber music recitals with faculty of the school. Furthermore, he was also the Principal 2nd Violinist in the Lansing Symphony Orchestra. Previously, Xie was an Artist-in-Residence for the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp as well as Concertmaster of its Festival Orchestra and First Violinist of a faculty quartet.