Tchaikovsky Spectacular!

     Peter Tchaikovsky was a restless soul and, following his resignation in 1878 from the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory, seldom remained long in one place. For the next seven years or so, the nearest thing to “home” for the composer was his small cottage on the Ukrainian estate of his sister Sasha at Kamenka, some 650 miles southwest of Moscow and about 50 miles northeast of L’vov near today’s border with Poland. The composer himself referred to the early 1880s as his “years of wandering,” years in which were premiered all four of the works on this KSO program.   His frequent stays in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as in Paris and at destinations in Italy, were ofttimes at residences of, or lodging arranged by, his widowed benefactress, Mrs. Nadezhka von Meck, from whom he also received at this time a modest annual stipend of 6,000 rubles. This sum was sufficient to allow the composer to live comfortably while devoting his time principally to composition, and it came with one unusual catch - they were to never meet in person. However, the pair carried on a lively, personal correspondence, much of which is extant today and available to scholars.
  

 
Festival Coronation March

Peter Il’yich Tchaikovsky, born May 7, 1840, at Kamsko-Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893, at St. Petersburg.

KSO Performance History: These performances are the first of this march on a KSO subscription concert.

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, triangle, and strings. 

     Czar Alexander III succeeded his father, Alexander II, as “Emperor of All the Russias” upon the latter’s assassination in March 1881. Alexander III, in turn, was the father of Nicholas II, the last Russian czar. Alexander III, since he had an older brother, Nicholas (1843-65), and a healthy father, was unprepared to be czar. He did, happily, heed his brother’s wish and married the latter’s fiancée, Princess Marie Dagmar of Denmark, in 1866 at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. It was for this wedding that Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose his Festival Overture on the Danish National Anthem, Op. 15; and, from that time, he maintained a cordial relationship with the future czar and czarina. When the music commissions for Alexander III’s May 1883 coronation went out belatedly in March of that year, Tchaikovsky, in Paris at the time, received, in near panic, not one, but two commissions: one for a cantata, Moscow, to be performed at a coronation-evening banquet in Granitzky Palace near Upensky Cathedral where the coronation occurred May 27, 1883 on the Kremlin grounds; and, another for the present march to be performed publicly nine days later.

Though initially “filled with dread,” the composer completed this regal and ornate march in about ten days. In harmony with the music’s original purpose, the march opens with an imposing fanfare, and the melody from the Russian anthem God Save the Czar is heard twice in the climax from the trombones and tuba. This tune will be heard again in the 1812 Overture that concludes this program. It is fitting to note that this music, in addition to opening this KSO milestone season, was conducted by the composer for the opening of New York City’s Carnegie Hall on May 5, 1891, just two days shy of his 51^st birthday.    

Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35

Premiere: December 4, 1881 in the Goldenersaal of Vienna’s Musikverein. The Vienna Philharmonic and violin soloist Adolf Brodsky were conducted by Hans Richter.

KSO Performance History: This concerto was first performed by the KSO March 29, 1955 as the concluding work to its 20^th Season with soloist Ruggiero Ricci and David Van Vactor, the orchestra’s Third Conductor. It has reappeared since on several KSO programs, including March 7, 1967 during David Van Vactor’s 20^th season, on which occasion the soloist was KSO Concertmaster, William Starr. The most recent previous performances occurred January 17 and 18, 2002 with soloist Tamaki Kawakubo and Kirk Trevor, the orchestra’s Sixth Conductor.

Instrumentation: in addition to violin solo, pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and trumpets; plus 4 horns, timpani, and strings.

     By the beginning of 1878, Peter Tchaikovsky managed to remove the two greatest impediments to his desired career as a composer. He had resigned from the Moscow Conservatory faculty, and he had arrangements made for the settlement of the legal and financial affairs pertaining to his extremely brief marriage to Antonina Miliukova.

     To stoke his creative fires, the composer’s brothers - the older Nikolay and the younger twins, Modest and Anatoly - trundled Peter off to Villa Richelieu, a comfortable boarding house in the resort city of Clarens, Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. The brothers had taken the composer there before in October 1877 after Peter had effectively ended his marriage and was teetering on the brink of a nervous meltdown. This prior hiatus restored Tchaikovsky sufficiently for him to complete two major works, the opera Eugene Onegin and the Fourth Symphony. It was hoped that the present stay would do the same. At first, he tried to resume work on a piano sonata (eventually, the Sonata in G Major, Op. 37), but it just wasn't working. The inspiration for a larger composition was needed, but the composer lacked focus. The inspiration came in mid-March with the unexpected arrival at Villa Richelieu of violinist Joseph Kotek, a competent musician who had studied at the Moscow Conservatory and with whom Tchaikovsky had a passionate affair of “unimaginable force” (Tchaikovsky's words) the previous year.

     Within a fortnight the work was sketched and completely orchestrated, with Kotek literally playing the piece page-by-page as Tchaikovsky completed each one, and with both of them critiquing the work as it quickly took shape. The composer immediately replaced the second movement Méditation with a Canzonetta which more fully explored the lower register of the violin. He later used the discarded movement as the first stanza of his three-movement Souvenir d’un lieu cher for violin and piano, published in 1879 as his Opus 43. Méditation, as orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov, was performed by the KSO and Mark Zelmanovich this past May on Mark’s Chamber Classics Series “Farewell Concert” concluding 24 seasons as the orchestra’s Concertmaster.

     The premiere of this concerto, and perhaps its dedication as well, probably could have been Kotek’s for the asking. He never did ask, nor did Tchaikovsky offer it to him, desiring to interest his friend Leopold Auer, professor of violin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1868 to 1917, whose celebrity could be calculated to give the concerto instant credibility and circulation. The composer and intended dedicatee even scheduled a premiere of the concerto for March 22, 1879 in St. Petersburg. When Tchaikovsky returned to Russia at the end of April 1878, he had a violin and piano reduction of the score printed and shown to Auer, who utterly shocked his friend by calling the work “unplayable.” The premiere scheduled for the next year was obviously called off, and Tchaikovsky quietly “shopped” the concerto around for another soloist with stature. He finally interested his fellow Russian (though Viennese trained) Adolf Brodsky, then on the faculty at the Leipzig Conservatory. After trying to interest the orchestras of Jules Pasdeloup and Edouard Colonne in Paris, Brodsky was able to secure the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic.

     The initial critical response was even more extreme than Auer’s initial assessment. The then dean of Viennese critics, Eduard Hanslick, caustically reviewed the premiere performance: “The violin is no longer played: it is yanked about, it is torn asunder, it is beaten black and blue...Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto brings to us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks in the ear.” This review caused Tchaikovsky to correspond with Brodsky, declaring in part: “Only after I read the review of the most authoritative Viennese critic, I fully appreciated your infinite courage...in appearing with my Concerto before the Viennese public. It surprises and touches me very deeply.” Tchaikovsky also directed his publisher to, in future printings, show a dedication of the work to Brodsky.

     Hanslick’s brutal words afflicted Tchaikovsky the rest of his life and, though Hanslick never changed his mind, Auer did. In time Auer performed the work to great success and, indeed, taught it to his more gifted pupils such as Jascha Heifetz and Mischa Elman. Audiences, it seems, never doubted the merit of the piece. It is one of the most popular of the genré, seemingly rivaled over the years only by that of Mendelssohn. 

     Tchaikovsky’s only Violin Concerto is in three movements, the last two of which are performed without pause. To retain cohesion in the transitions in this work, Tchaikovsky wrote out the two cadenzas that appear, one near the end of the first movement and the other as the brief bridge between the last two stanzas. The immense first movement is more than half the length of the entire concerto, filled with virtuosic display – fleeting passagework, multiple stops, frequent trills, and emotive chromatics. The brief Canzonetta: Andante is a simple, endearing aria, while the animated Finale is set ablaze in a relentless, breathless brilliance. 

Capriccio italien, Op. 45

Premiere: December 18, 1880 by the orchestra of Moscow’s Imperial Russian Music Society with Nikolay Rubinstein conducting. 

KSO Performance History: This work was first performed by the KSO at the conclusion of the opening concert to its 20^th Season on October 26, 1954 with David Van Vactor conducting. It was also on the program when the KSO inaugurated its 27^th Season in the new Knoxville Civic Auditorium on September 8, 1961, again, with David Van Vactor conducting. The most recent performance on a KSO subscription concert occurred nearly 41 years ago on November 11, 1969 with David Van Vactor conducting.

Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling on piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, harp, and strings.

     When Tchaikovsky arrived in Rome December 20, 1879, it marked his third consecutive year for visiting the Italian peninsula, and it certainly would not be his last time there. Sojourns to this climate usually placed the composer in a cheery state that inspired him, immediately or soon after, to put music to paper. This visit initially had the desired effect on the composer. The Hotel Constanzi, where Tchaikovsky and his brother Modest were staying, was adjacent to the barracks of the Royal Italian Cuirassiers. With each sunset, a bugle call sounded from the barracks. Tchaikovsky wrote it down almost immediately and it evolved into the brass fanfare that opens what he came to call his Capriccio italien.

     Within a few days the famous annual carnival was omnipresent throughout the streets of Rome and, although the “wild raving of the crowd” annoyed him, Tchaikovsky absorbed its spontaneous melodies and rhythms. In the span of a single week, he had sketched a work with which he was very pleased. In a letter to Mrs. von Meck at the end of January 1880, the composer informed: “I have sketched the rough draft of an Italian Capriccio based on popular melodies. I think it has a bright future; it will be effective because of the wonderful melodies I happened to pick up, partly from published collections and partly out of the streets with my own ears.”

     While at work sketching his Capriccio italien, Tchaikovsky received word from his brother Anatoly that their 84-year-old father had died in St. Petersburg. Though saddened, Tchaikovsky was not distraught. He confided in Mrs. von Meck that he had “wept a great deal” and “[i]t seems to me that these tears...have had a beneficial effect on me. I feel an enlightenment and a reconciliation in my heart.” The composer’s progress on Capriccio italien, and its music, contained not a hint of this sad news and, in fact, like the tears he shed, probably helped to sustain him. Growing weary of Rome, as he did most any place after a month or two, Tchaikovsky left for St. Petersburg at the end of February, traveling via Paris and Berlin, with the Capriccio italien still just a sketch.

     Tchaikovsky remained a month in St. Petersburg, but social engagements and no less than three all-Tchaikovsky concerts by the St. Petersburg orchestra left no time for composing. In April, he headed for Moscow and spent several tedious weeks correcting the proofs of his opera, The Maid of New Orléans. Only by May 1880 did Tchaikovsky clear time in Moscow to finish the orchestration of his Capriccio italien, the autograph carrying a completion date of May 27th. As its composer predicted in correspondence from Rome, the work was extremely well-received at its premiere and was soon repeated, which, along with performances of the generous number of Tchaikovsky’s other works by the Society’s orchestra, caused at least one Moscow critic to dub that fall “Tchaikovsky’s season.”

     Tchaikovsky’s ear for assimilating “authentic” themes - the opening fanfare he heard daily in Rome at sunset, others he found in a published collection during a library visit, and the Roman street songs that stuck in his mind – was cannily unerring and imbued his Capriccio italien with the sunny disposition and lively spirit of the Italian people and their rich musical heritage.

Festival Overture: The Year 1812, Op. 49

Premiere: This commissioned work was composed in October-November 1880 for the anticipated 1881 completion of Cathedral of Christ the Savior on the Moscow River just west of the Kremlin. Construction began on this, the world’s tallest Orthodox church, in 1839 to commemorate the Russian victory September 7, 1812 over Napoleon’s Grand Armée at the Battle of Borodino, 75 miles west of Moscow. The assassination in March 1881 of Czar Alexander II, a strong supporter of the construction, delayed the cathedral’s completion until the following year. It is uncertain whether this overture was performed as planned in the square before the cathedral, with large orchestra augmented by military band, authentic military cannons, and the bells of cathedrals throughout Moscow peeling on cue. It is certain that this overture was performed August 8, 1882, in-doors and without the above-described augmentations, on an all-Tchaikovsky concert to open Moscow’s 1882 Arts and Industry Exhibition with Ippolit Al’tani conducting.

KSO Performance History: This overture was first performed by the KSO on May 19, 1948 as the finale to what was then billed as the orchestra’s first “Pop Concert,” concluding conductor David Van Vactor’s first season with the KSO. The orchestra has repeated the overture on a number of festive and commemorative occasions, including the Eighth Annual Free Family Outdoor Concert inaugurating its 50^th Season. The concert occurred at Tennessee Amphitheater in World’s Fair Park on September 16, 1984, led by Zoltán Rozsnyai, the orchestra’s Fifth Conductor. That 1984 program also included the KSO’s second performance of the 1928 Pulitzer-Prize-winning From the Southern Mountains composed by Lamar Stringfield, the KSO’s Second Conductor. The present Tchaikovsky overture was last performed on a subscription concert as part of the KSO’s 60^th anniversary celebration, on January 11 and 12, 1996 under the direction of Kirk Trevor, now Conductor Emeritus, who will join in the present 75^th anniversary celebration by leading the upcoming March Masterworks concerts.

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, chimes, cannon, and strings.

     The Battle of Borodino was strategically a draw remarkable for its enormous casualty list running into six figures. The Russians then withdrew behind Moscow, denying that spoil’s sustenance to Napoleon’s forces by setting the city ablaze. Napoleon’s Grand Armée could only retrace its steps as the Russian winter - and snipers and insurgents – decimated the invaders. This victory 198 years ago this month was all the more glorious to the Russians because, although they tacitly had allies at the time, they faced Napoleon’s forces alone on Russian soil. Tchaikovsky’s considerable skills in portraying historic events with sonic realism are as undeniable as is the overture’s enduring popularity the world over. Music writer Louis Biancolli observed more than sixty years ago:

Tchaikovsky’s brushstrokes are bold and obvious. The French and Russians are clearly depicted through the use of the Czarist National Anthem and the “Marseillaise.” Fragments of Cossack and Novgorod folk songs enter the scheme, and the battle and fire scenes are as plain as pictures. As the overture develops, one envisions the clash of arms at Borodino, with the Russians stiffly disputing every step and the “Marseillaise” finally rising dominant. The Russians are hurled back; the French are in Moscow. Finally the city is ablaze and the dismal rout begins, as cathedral bells mingle with the roll of drums and the hymn[s] “God Preserve Thy People” [and “God Save the Czar”] surg[e] out in a paean of victory.

     As with the opening march on this concert, the composer conducted this overtureat the opening of New York City’s Carnegie Hall during his only visit to America.

Notes by Rudy Ennis
© 2010 The Mozart Works

Dylana Jenson, biography

“A Mature Master” -  New York Times
“Fire, passion and rhythmic elan” -  Strad Magazine

Dylana Jenson has performed with most major orchestras in the United States and traveled to Europe, Australia, Japan and Latin America for concerts, recitals and recordings. After her triumphant success at the Tchaikovsky Competition, where she became the youngest and first American woman to win the Silver Medal, she made her Carnegie Hall debut playing the Sibelius Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

Her recent Carnegie Hall performance of Karl Goldmark’s violin concerto again electrified the audience. According to Strad Magazine, "In Jenson's hands, lyrical passages had an intense, tremulous quality...a sizzling performance."   Harris Goldsmith of the New York Concert Review said, "I can give no higher praise than to say that her excellent performance brought to mind, and was a loving tribute to, the great Nathan Milstein… one of Jenson’s mentors." 

Jenson, who was made an Honorary Citizen of Costa Rica for her artistic contribution to her mother’s homeland, comes from a family with a strong tradition in the arts.Her sister, Vicky Jenson, directed the films ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shark Tale’. Her brother, Ivan Jenson, is a painter and poet.Her daughter, Mariama Lockington, is a Hopwood award-winning poet.

In tandem with her solo career, Jenson has been busy giving Master Classes and teaching at summer music festivals. In her teaching, she uses the Russian technique taught by Leopold Auer and championed by great artists such as Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Isaac Stern and Jasha Heifetz. This method develops a natural physical relationship to the instrument.

Dylana Jenson started the violin at the age of two and a half with her mother. She then studied with Manual Compinsky, Nathan Milstein and Josef Gingold.

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