Composer Russell Steinberg—Music and Writings

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON Monday January 26, 2009, 7:00 PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall San Francisco Symphony Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor Thomas: Street Song Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 5 Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 Thomas Street Song This gorgeous piece in three movements without pause was originally written for the Empire Brass Quintet and later expanded to a larger brass ensemble. It displays a beautiful sense of harmony and counterpoint, and great feel for the American style made so popular by Copland and Bernstein. Michael Tilson Thomas notes: “Street Song is in three continuous parts—an interweaving of three "songs." The first song opens with a jagged downward scale suspending in the air a sweetly dissonant harmony that very slowly resolves. This moment of resolution is followed by responses of various kinds. The harmonies move between the world of the Middle Ages and the present, between East and West, and always, of course, from the perspective of twentieth-century America. Overall, the movement is about starting and stopping, the moments of suspension always leading somewhere else. The second song is introduced by a singsong horn solo. It is followed by a simple trumpet duet, which was first written around 1972. It is folklike in character and also cadences with suspended moments of slowly resolving dissonance. The third song is really more of a dance. It begins when the trombone slides a step higher, bringing the work into the key of F-sharp and into a jazzier swing. The harmonies here are the stacked-up moments of suspension from the first two parts of the piece. By now, I hope these "dissonant" sounds actually begin to sound "consonant." There is a resolution, but it is the world of a musician who after many after-hour gigs, greets the dawn. Finally, the three songs are brought together and the work moves toward a quiet close.” PROKOFIEV PIANO CONCERTO #5 Written in 1931-32, the fifth concerto is in five movements, the most ambitious of all his concerti. It’s not what we normally think of as a concerto—a soloist accompanied by an orchestra waiting for an opportunity to perform a cadenza. No, Prokofiev was trying something different. It also isn’t a “disguised” symphony like the Brahms piano concerti. Instead, it is more like a fusion of orchestral suite and concerto. And don’t be put off by the five movements—four of them go pretty fast! The first three movements are short and get increasingly fast. The third is a virtuoso toccata for piano and orchestra. The fourth movement is a genuine slow lyrical expansive movement. And the finale goes back to a quick tempo. Prokofiev was a modern composer who rejected the idea that tonality was exhausted. He loved adventurous harmonies that expanded the tonal system to the edge of comprehension, but unlike Schoenberg, he felt going over the brink and throwing out the tonal system was a mistake. He was hardly alone in this conclusion, but he came to it many years before his compatriot Igor Stravinsky. I think a great way to grasp Prokofiev’s harmonic language is to hear the theme from Peter and the Wolf first WITHOUT its extended harmonies. It sounds not so interesting and pretty conventional. This is the tune without having been “Prokofiev-ized.” So what does it mean to “Prokofiev-ize” a tune? It means to make the harmonic motion BACK to the home key an adventure of surprise. He adds chords that have no business in the key and in fact threaten to erase the home key entirely. Then when we think we have lost it, he finds a backdoor that pops us suddenly back to the tonic. But to be a tonal composer in a world of modernism was to walk a fine edge. The danger of being dated or becoming ensnared in older formulas and conventions was ever-present. And in fact, so many of the marvelous musical languages we adore in 20th century composers—Bartok, Berg, Shostakovich, Copland, and yes Prokofiev’s—were developed not intuitively but after struggle, self-doubt, and conscious working out of aesthetic ideas. The Prokofiev we all know and love—Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Lt. Kije—was an accumulation of experiments to find a simple style of writing that presented tonality in a modern way. The 5th Piano Concerto was a conscious attempt at creating this style and Prokofiev wrote explicitly about how he succeeded and failed in this vein: “When you become infatuated with the search for a new melodic style and for a new simplicity, you can begin to forget how far you have drifted from shore. If we discount the Fourth Concerto for left hand, more than ten years had passed since I had written a piano concerto. Since then my conception of the treatment of this form had changed somewhat, some new ideas had occurred to me (a passage running across the entire keyboard, with the left hand overtaking the right; chords in the piano and orchestra interrupting one another, etc.) and finally I had accumulated a good number of vigorous major themes in my notebook. I had not intended the concerto to be difficult and at first had even contemplated calling it “Music for Piano and Orchestra,” partly to avoid confusing the concerto numbers. But in the end it turned out to be complicated, as indeed was the case with a good many other compositions of this period. What was the explanation? In my desire for simplicity I was hampered by the fear of repeating old formulas, of reverting to ‘old simplicity,’ which is something all modern composers seek to avoid. I searched for ‘new simplicity’ only to discover that this new simplicity, with its novel forms and, chiefly, new tonal structure, was not understood. The fact that here and there my efforts to write simply were not successful is beside the point. I did not give up, hoping that the bulk of my music would in time prove to be quite simple when the ear grew accustomed to the new melodies, that is, when these melodies became the accepted idiom.” The opening of the first movement is a fine example of how Prokofiev fuses the old with the new. It’s practically a waltz in G major, but intrusions by chords and scales outside the key (like Ab major) muddy the key. Yet the first and last chords are “textbook” tonality. The brilliant rapid scales and glissandi in the piano also throw us off. These glissandi become a major idea in the concerto. The second movement scherzo is a comical march. The piano amplifies its harp role, glissandi rampaging up and down the instrument. The march contrasts with a tarantella section. The third movement toccata is a 2 minute tour de force lasting 2 minutes in breath-taking perpetual motion. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same material as the opening movement! Essentially, Prokofiev has expanded his first movement into three movements—creating a large ABA structure. And THAT is the reason the concerto is 5 instead of 3 movements. The fourth movement is the first genuinely lyrical moment in the piece with the famous Prokofiev long stretching melodies. It also has the only extended piano cadenza, a sprawling chordal interlude with rolled chords spanning the entire instrument. The finale is a strange piece. It begins like a toccata and acquires a catchy theme that repeats elusively in different keys throughout the orchestra. But scales have an important role too in this movement. Halfway through the music quiets suddenly and the piano plays an ostinato of two different speeds of ascending scales. This pedal point continues for awhile until the energy of the piece is brought literally to a halt! A lyrical march begins with a syncopated variation of the catchy theme. The remainder of the piece is a gradual acceleration of this tune to a bravura finish with the orchestra ascending by scale. Tchaikovsky Symphony #5 Tchaikovsky even more than Schubert turned the symphony into songs for orchestra. The profusion of truly great melodies is one reason Tchaikovsky is still the most popular composer for classical audiences. The other reason is that those melodies create a narrative that everyone can follow, even through more than three quarters of an hour of instrumental music. Tchaikovsky wrote this piece 10 years after the 4th symphony. Indeed, there were rumors that he was “written out” and only after a successful tour of Europe did he feel ready to tackle a major symphonic work again. Like the 4th, this symphony uses a central motto theme. His notebooks suggest the idea of “resignation before fate,” but other than that, there is no program or story specifically for the piece. I don’t think it needs one because the melodic ideas are so clear. The motto theme appears in each movement. It has a march quality, but whether that is to ultimately be a funeral march or a heroic march of victory is not clear at first. It seems clear to me that this piece is Tchaikovsky’s reference to Beethoven’s 5th symphony—another piece famous for its motto. And if you pay attention to the last notes of this Tchaikovsky symphony, there can be no mistake about the connection. But the first movement is more like Mozart in that it has an unbelievable profusion of melodies, all of them great. Unlike classical composers, Tchaikovsky does not build a symphony out of fragments, but instead out of fully conceived themes. And that is what we hear with the opening clarinet theme, playing in its lowest register accompanied by somber strings. The primary area is another song (or march), again beginning with clarinet. The transition, secondary area, and closing—another three great tunes. These four great melodies comprise the narrative of the movement and they intertwine in ways simple to hear. Two wonderful moments I want to point out: 1) in the recapitulation, the march theme has the most exquisite accompaniment of arabesque scales in the winds 2) the very end of the movement is both a surprise and a harbinger of the Pathetique symphony. After seeming to conclude in glorious major mode with full orchestral tutti, the music quiets down in the coda back to its somber beginnings with the clarinet, but now gets downright lugubrious. The basses and celli conclude with low thick E minor chords—foreshadowing the sonic miracle end of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony. The second movement continues the dark and deep sound of low strings in a chorale introduction to that most famous of horn melodies. As beautiful as is the shape of the melody, the multitude of harmonies makes for the color and emotion that we love so much in Tchaikovsky. One would expect that the contrasting theme to such an extraordinary melody would be something of different character, certainly not ANOTHER lyrical theme. But that is precisely what Tchaikovsky gives us. Its beauty is partly due to the exquisite harmony resulting from its echoing phrases: The motto theme makes its appearance now not as a funeral march, but as a dramatic fanfare in the brass The third movement is a waltz. In his dance movements, Tchaikovsky shows virtuoso skill in handling the woodwinds, and this piece is no exception. The recurrence of the motto theme appears as a hollow echo at the end of the movement in clarinets and bassoons. The fourth movement opens with an introduction: the strings play the motto theme as a grand march in major mode. The brass take over and this introduction becomes its own little piece. It lasts 3 minutes—longer than the Toccata movement of the preceding Prokovief concerto. The allegro that follows is fast and unrelenting. The Transition theme and its consequent phrase are particularly beguiling and lyrical. But the pace continues with a second theme that has a pounding slow trill. Tchaikovsky even tunes the timpani a second apart so they can hammer out the accompaniment too. The motto theme reappears in the brass, bridging into the development section. You’ll notice that the slow trill accompaniment colors the whole section, even at the end where the violins play a slow trill diminuendo. The coda of this finale is a regal triumph. The motto theme in the brass ends the recapitulation with full force and a cadence on the dominant occurs with such force and lingering that it to the uninitiated the piece might sound over. But then comes the coda, a fully “tricked out” march of Wagnerian pomp like in the March of the Meistersingers. A final operatic presto hurls the piece to a frenzied triumphant conclusion. *************************************************************