FWCO Spring Concert

Donald O. Johnston (b. 1929)

Fanfare in Memoriam (from The Lewis and Clark Symphony)

Donald Johnston studied at Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota) and Northwestern University in addition to studies with composers Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He has composed numerous choral and orchestral works (including six symphonies), an opera, chamber music and works for band. In his music, he aims to validate the neo-Romantic tradition of his mentor, Howard Hanson with “logical, well-balanced formal construction; piquant harmonies; striking rhythmic constructions — all of these have an immediate appeal for audiences.”

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Danse Bacchanal (from Samson et Dalila)

Like Handel before him, Camille Saint-Saëns saw great dramatic possibilities in the story of Samson and Delilah. With its intense themes of tribal allegiance, romantic desire, betrayal, humiliation and revenge, it was operatic gold. Yet despite the rich vein of human vice and frailty to be mined from the Old Testament – and despite the composer’s growing reputation – Paris’ opera houses feared that their patrons would stay away en masse from a show based on a Biblical subject and refused to mount his opera.

Riding to Saint-Saëns’ rescue was composer, pianist and priest Franz Liszt, who took on the project and conducted the concert premiere of Samson et Dalila in Weimar in December, 1877. It would be another 15 years before opera finally came to Paris for its stage premiere, but the choice of subject matter would prove to be wise. Of the 13 operas that Saint-Saëns wrote, only Samson has found a welcome home in the world’s opera houses.

A popular concert piece, the exuberant Danse Bacchanale is from the ballet music in Act III. The Philistines celebrate their deliverance from Samson in a wild, orgiastic dance before the disgraced hero – blind and shackled – is dragged to the Temple of Dagon for his final denouement.

Saint-Saëns traveled widely, and his music sometimes reflected exotic locales in Africa and the Middle East – his Suite Algérienne and Egyptian Concerto, for instance. Though the ancient Palestine of Biblical times predated the birth of Islam and the Arab golden age by two millennia, Saint-Saëns nevertheless wove Arabic-inspired melody, harmony and rhythm into the Bacchanale, starting with a sinuously lyrical oboe solo – sounding much like a muezzin’s morning prayer – to the irregular beat of the thundering timpani.

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16

It has the most iconic piano entrance in the entire concerto literature. Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto may be more heroic, Rachmaninoff’s Second more brooding, but the tumbling cascade of notes that announce the Grieg Piano Concerto is unchallenged for sheer drama.

All the more remarkable, considering his inspiration was the “straight-out-of-the-gate” entrance from an earlier piano concerto in A-minor, the one by Robert Schumann. Grieg first heard it when he was a student in Leipzig, played by Schumann’s widow, Clara. The falling three-note motive (sol-ti-do) in Grieg’s dramatic opening bars is a characteristic gesture of Norwegian folksong. And like the “Clara” theme of Schumann’s concerto, which weaves through much of that composer’s music, those three notes show up in several of Grieg’s later works, notably the Lyric Suite, the Symphonic Dances and his G minor String Quartet.

By the time he composed the concerto in 1868 at the tender age of 25, Grieg was already under the spell of the late Norwegian composer Rikard Nodraak, who advocated a national music language based on native folk melodies. The concerto’s themes aren’t explicitly from folk tunes, but its powerful sense of place speaks to the pervasiveness of Norway in Grieg’s musical consciousness. And like those other Romantic piano concertos, Grieg’s melodies proved irresistible to lyricists.

The spin-off songs from Grieg’s concerto haven’t proven as indelible as Tchaikovsky’s (Tonight We Love) or Rachmaninoff’s (Full Moon and Empty Arms and Eric Carmen’s All By Myself), but the Broadway schlockmeisters Wright & Forrest set words to all of the Grieg Concerto’s tunes in their 1944 musical Song of Norway. The first movement contains two important themes. After the concerto’s dramatic opening, the woodwinds whisper the main melody in A minor, or in Wright & Forrest’s irresistibly awful lyrics:

Once long ago,
Long, long ago,
’Mid these hills dwelled a maid,
Mark you well, for the maiden’s name was Norway!
Trolls and men were entranced when Norway danced!

The piano restates the melody and plays fleet-fingered arabesques before the cellos introduce the secondary idea in C major – or in the Broadway show’s flirtatious banter by Grieg, his future wife Nina and Nordraak:

Nordraak: I’ll right the world and its wrongs if you are near me.
Nina: I’ll be near you.
Grieg: I’ll write such wonderful songs if you can hear me.
Nina: I will hear you.

Franz Liszt was entranced by the concerto’s music when he read through it, but Grieg tinkered with it to the end of his life – never on the melodies but the instrumentation. The version performed here was his final edition.

Niccolò Paganini
Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 6

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Symphony No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 82

The seven symphonies of Sibelius bridged a creative period of 25 years from 1899 to 1924, followed by the most profound silence in musical history. Though he struggled over an eighth symphony for the next 30 years, barely three minutes of manuscript survive, and he composed essentially nothing after 1926.

To mark the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the Helsinki Philharmonic commissioned Sibelius to write a Fifth Symphony. The hostile reception to his enigmatic Fourth in 1911 was still fresh in his memory (“When I performed my Fourth Symphony for the first time, no one applauded and no one came to thank me,” the composer would recall three decades later.) At the same time, the musical landscape was being shaken by the spare atonality of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), the explosive savagery of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and newly emergent voices of Bartók and Prokofiev.

Like other composers of his generation – Mahler, Debussy, Nielsen and Richard Strauss – Sibelius met the new century with a vision all his own, anchored firmly to the old century. It was his conscious choice – in his Fifth Symphony – to reject a modernist path and embrace the harmonic language he knew. The Symphony’s creation felt to him like a spiritual journey. “The disposition of the themes: with all its mystery and fascination this the important thing,” he wrote. “It is as if God the Father had thrown down mosaic pieces from heaven’s floor and asked me to put them back as they were.”

But putting those mosaic fragments together into a unified whole was a trial, and Sibelius composed three different versions of the symphony in 1915, 1916 and 1919. The original was in four movements, but Sibelius – who valued content over form – later combined the first and the second movement scherzo into a single, organically flowering movement. It begins quietly with a rising horn call followed by the fluttering of woodwind groups like an awakening of nature. A gently swaying motion, like the rocking of a cradle or a pendulum swing, emerges in the strings, but the movement slowly gains energy as it builds toward a sweeping heroic finish.

The slow movement superposes a languorous theme in the woodwinds against a steady pizzicato theme, both set to variations like evolving countermelodies. The finale – in a mirror image of the first movement – shoots out of the gate with kinetic speed. Soon, a majestic horn theme in rising and falling triplets emerges – inspired by the composer’s sighting of 16 swans. “Oh God, what beauty,” Sibelius wrote. “They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the hazy sun like a glittering, silver ribbon… Nature’s mystery and life’s melancholy! The Fifth Symphony’s finale theme.” The original version of the symphony was withdrawn by Sibelius; the 1916 edition was lost. His final version – the standard edition – concludes with six explosive chords for full orchestra – one of the most inscrutable finishes in all of music. It was this symphony – heard in a concert in Helsinki led by Sir Malcolm Sargent on September 20, 1957 – that was being played at the moment when the 91-year-old composer died at home in Ainola.