Fung Plays Shostakovich

Daniel Raiskin, conductor
Zlatomir Fung, cello

Dmitri Shostakovich: Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 107
(1906-1975)

     Allegretto

     Moderato

     Cadenza

     Allegro con moto

     Zlatomir Fung, cello

Carl Nielsen: Symphony No. 2, Op. 16 (The Four Temperaments)
(1865-1931)

     Allegro collerico

     Allegro comodo e flemmatico

     Andante malincolico

     Allegro sanguineo

Pre-Concert Performance

Sergei Rachmaninoff: Sonata No.2
Yanzhi Zhang, piano

Daniel Raiskin, conductor

Zlatomir Fung, cello

Cello Concerto No. 1
Dmitri Shostakovich
b. St. Petersburg, Russia / September 25, 1906
d. Moscow / August 9, 1975
Composed: 1959
First performance: October 4, 1959 (Leningrad) conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist
Last WSO performance: 2011; Alexander Mickelthwate, conductor; Jian Wang, cello

During his tumultuous life, Dmitri Shostakovich served the state as a composer while secretly challenging it. His First Cello Concerto delivers a blend of humour, lyricism, and defiance.

By the time he turned 21, Shostakovich had achieved international fame for his First Symphony. His idealistic side told him he should be a composer whose responsibility was to serve the state. Therefore, he would write “realist” music rooted in tonality but with a progressive edge. As an admirer of Berg and the Second Viennese School though, Shostakovich was drawn to avant-garde tendencies, and this got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities – the dreaded “formalist” label sent his way, with its “confused stream of sounds,” as the government’s musical arbiters described.

Such condemnation could lead to severe consequences. Millions disappeared under Stalin’s purges for lesser reasons. Shostakovich was regularly bullied, starting with the article in Pravda savaging his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which came out two years after its highly successful premiere in 1934. Again in 1948, Shostakovich and five of his colleagues were denounced by the Stalin regime for adhering to “perversions, dissonance and contempt for melody,” and the composer was forced to apologize publicly for his compositions.

With humiliating obedience, Shostakovich would tow the party line for the rest of his life. But underneath all his serious compositions lay a firm resolve against the repression, even in the latter years after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.

Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto stands with his First Violin Concerto (1948) as his most successful achievement in the concerto form. They were written without commission for his friends Mstislav Rostropovich and David Oistrakh, both of whom drove the composer’s creative ambition through their extraordinary musicianship in the creations, premieres and subsequent performances.

Shostakovich told Rostropovich that the impulse behind the First Cello Concerto came from hearing Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, saying he had played his recording so many times, he had worn it out! Shostakovich had originally projected a concerto in three movements but had expanded it to four upon completion. Similarities with the Violin Concerto abound, and the Cello Concerto quickly established itself as one of his most popular works.

In the words of the composer, the first movement is “an Allegretto in the character of a humorous march.” A memorable four-note motto pervades, and the movement drives forward with high energy. The second movement is a powerful dirge and is the lyrical centrepiece of the work. The third movement cadenza is expanded to become an enormous accelerating transition to the finale. As also found in the Violin Concerto, the cadenza is of real structural importance rather than its normal role as a showy parenthesis of previous material.

The finale is rustic and driving, capped near the end by the return of the first movement’s four-note motive. Shostakovich privately told Rostropovich with perverse pleasure how he enjoyed his grotesque distortion of the opening phrase of the Georgian folk tune Suliko in the finale. It was rumoured to be Stalin’s favourite song and appears in rapid exchanges between strings and woodwinds just after the first statement of the gruff theme.

Music

Gypsy (musical), Jule Styne & Steven Sondheim

Mowtown Records founded

Art

Portrait of Yevgeny Mravinsky, Lev A. Russov

Literature

Goldfinger, Ian Fleming

A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

Film

Ben-Hur

Some Like it Hot

History

Barbie makes her debut

Alaska and Hawaii becomes US states

Symphony No. 2 (The Four Temperaments)
Carl Nielsen
b. Sortelung, Denmark / June 9, 1865
d. Copenhagen / October 3, 1931
Composed: 1901-1902
First performance: December 1, 1962 (Copenhagen) conducted by the composer
Last WSO performance: 1966; Victor Feldbrill, conductor

The music of Carl Nielsen is a dramatic example of Denmark’s unique musical voice. His Symphony No. 2, “The Four Temperaments,” paints vivid portraits of human complexity. A testament to his originality, it translates emotions into music.

Though Nielsen’s stature as Denmark’s musical figurehead is commonly accepted, his name doesn’t involuntarily resonate among Nordic composers the same way as with Grieg and Sibelius, who invite familiarity with time-worn music evoking their heritages. Nielsen’s is a uniquely individual voice: provocative and original in his dramatic emphasis, emotionally direct yet free of sentimentality, resourceful and brilliant in his use of orchestral forces. All of these qualities are evident across his six symphonies written over a period of 35 years, each of which is more adventurous than the one before.

Born in the same Eastern Denmark township as Hans Christian Andersen, Nielsen played in a military band in Odense at age 14. Ten years later, he joined the Royal Theatre Orchestra (later the Royal Danish Orchestra) in Copenhagen as a violinist. He would later become its principal conductor for six years.

In 1890, he won a scholarship to travel to Dresden and Berlin, where he was exposed to Wagner’s Ring, which greatly impressed the young composer. But Brahms proved a major influence as he started writing symphonies. Nielsen’s First Symphony was successfully premiered in 1894 by the Royal Theatre Orchestra, and from then on, his rise was rapid.

Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2 (The Four Temperaments) was a giant step from his First of a decade earlier. The idea for the Second came after a visit to a village pub. There, he spotted a naive, brightly coloured painting depicting the Four Temperaments – characters based on the medieval theory that there are four basic temperaments which regulate the human personality. Nielsen laughed out loud at the comic, exaggerated figures representing the Choleric, the Phlegmatic, the Melancholic and the Sanguine man, yet couldn’t get them out of his mind. “These simple paintings contained a core of goodness and – even – a musical possibility into the bargain,” he recalled some 30 years later.

Nielsen had always been fascinated by psychology, and his letters contain perceptive portraits of musicians he encountered. In the Second Symphony, he aimed to translate human complexity into music, perhaps recognizing the contradictions evident in his own volatile character.

In November 1902, Nielsen conducted the premiere of his first opera Saul and David at the Royal Theatre. Three days later, he conducted the first performance of his Second Symphony for the Danish Concert Association. It was well received by the audience, but the reviews were mixed.

Nielsen made his own extensive program note for The Four Temperaments:

“The first movement, Allegro collerico, starts impetuously…the second subject sings very espressivo, but is soon interrupted by violently shifting figures and rhythmic jerks…In the development, this material is worked over, now wildly and impetuously, like one who is beside himself, now in a softer mood, like one who regrets his irascibility…

“The second movement is meant to be a complete contrast to the first…While sketching this movement, I visualized a young fellow…about 17 or 18 years old, with sky-blue eyes, confident and big…everything idyllic and heavenly in nature was to be found in this young lad…the mood of the music is as far removed as possible from energy and emotionalism…

“The third movement tries to express the basic character of a heavy melancholic man…After a bar and a half of introduction, the theme begins, drawn heavily towards a strong outcry of pain; then comes, on the oboe, a little plaintive sighing motive that slowly develops, ending in a climax of lamentation and suffering…

“In the finale Allegro sanguineo, I have tried to sketch a man who storms thoughtlessly forward in the belief that the whole world belongs to him…There is, though, a moment in which something scares him, and all at once he gasps for breath in rough syncopations: but this is soon forgotten, and even if the music turns to the minor, his cheery, rather superficial nature still asserts itself…”

Music

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande

Scott Joplin, The Entertainer

Art

Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Gustav Klimt

Notre-Dame, une fin d’après-midi, Henri Matisse

Literature

The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter

History

First motor car appears on Winnipeg streets

Marie & Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive compound radium chloride

MUSICIANS

FIRST VIOLINS

Gwen Hoebig,
  Concertmaster
The Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté Memorial Chair, endowed by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation
Karl Stobbe,
  Associate Concertmaster
Jeff Dydra,
  Assistant Principal
Mona Coarda
Tara Fensom
Hong Tian Jia
Mary Lawton
Sonia Lazar
Julie Savard
Jun Shao
Rebecca Weger**
Trevor Kirczenow (guest)
Momoko Matsumura (guest)

SECOND VIOLINS

Chris Anstey,
  Principal
Elation Pauls,
  Assistant Principal
Karen Bauch
Kristina Bauch,
Elizabeth Dyer
Bokyung Hwang
Rodica Jeffrey
Susan McCallum
Takayo Noguchi
Jane Radomski
Erika Sloos (guest)

VIOLAS

Elise Lavallée,
  Acting Principal
Dmytro Kreshchenskyi,**
  Acting Assistant Principal
Marie-Elyse Badeau
Laszlo Baroczi
Richard Bauch
Greg Hay
Michael Scholz
Miguel Stamato (guest)

CELLOS

Yuri Hooker,
  Principal
Robyn Neidhold,
  Assistant Principal
Ethan Allers
Arlene Dahl
Alyssa Ramsay*
Sean Taubner
Emma Quackenbush
Samuel Nadurak (guest)
Leanne Zacharias (guest)

BASSES

Meredith Johnson,
  Principal
Daniel Perry,
  Assistant Principal
James McMillan
Eric Timperman*
Emily Krajewski
Taras Pivniak**

FLUTES

Jan Kocman,
  Principal
  Supported by Gordon & Audrey Fogg
Alex Conway
Laura MacDougall (guest)

PICCOLO FLUTE

Alex Conway,
  Principal

OBOES

Beverly Wang,
  Principal
Robin MacMillan
Lief Mosbaugh (guest)
Renz Adame (guest)

CLARINETS

Micah Heilbrunn,
  Principal
Alex Whitehead

BASSOONS

Kathryn Brooks,
  Principal
Elizabeth Mee

HORNS

Patricia Evans,
  Principal
Ken MacDonald,
  Associate Principal
  The Hilda Schelberger Memorial Chair
Aiden Kleer
Caroline Oberheu
Michiko Singh
Todd Martin (guest)

TRUMPETS

Chris Fensom,
  Principal
Isaac Pulford
  The Patty Kirk Memorial Chair
Paul Jeffrey,
  Associate Principal

TROMBONES

Steven Dyer,*
  Principal
Keith Dyrda,
  Acting Principal
Kyle Orlando**

TUBA

Justin Gruber,
  Principal

PERCUSSION

Andrew Johnson,
  Principal

TIMPANI

Andrew Nazer (guest)

HARP

To be determined
  Endowed by W.H. & S.E. Loewen

PIANO

Donna Laube (guest)

BASS

Ruslan Rusin (guest)

PERSONNEL MANAGER

Isaac Pulford

MUSIC LIBRARIAN

Michaela Kleer

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN

Aiden Kleer

* On Leave
** One-year appointment