UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA CONCERT SERIES

Fifty-first season

PHILHARMONIA HUNGARICA

REINHARD PETERS, MUSIC DIRECTOR

ZOLTAN ROSNAY, FOUNDING CONDUCTOR

REINHARD PETERS, CONDUCTING

BALINT VAZSONYI, PIANIST

Jesse Auditorium

Saturday, October 29, 1977 8:15 p.m.

PROGRAM

Symphony No, 102, in B Flat .....•...•..•. Haydn

Largo - Vlvace Adagio Minuet: Allegro Finale: Presto

/ .,,, Dances from Marosszek. . Kodaly

Intermission

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4, in G Major, Op. 58 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • Beethoven

Allegro moderato Andante con moto Rondo: Vivace

Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy .... . ... Tchaikovsky

The Philharmonia Hungarica records for Vox-Tumabout and London-Mercury.

Balint Vazsonyi records for Deutsche Grammophon, Vox, Pye and Genes is •

Hans-Helmut Mohler, Intendant of the Philharmonia Hungarica

Management and Tour Direction by: KAZUKO HILLYER INTERNATIONAL, INC., 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019

Kazuko Hillyer, President Vincent Wagner, Vice President & Head, North American

Operations John Dudich, Concert Coordinator

Ushers, Courtesy of Sigma Alpha Iota

Symphony No. 102, in B Flat ......•.. Joseph Haydn (Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Lower Austria; died May 31, 1809 in Vienna)

Haydn was so pleased by the success of his London con­certs in 1791 and 179 2 that he quickly accepted the offer of a return engagement for 1794 and 1795. The English public had a great appetite for new music, and it was again .stipulated that he would write six new symphonies for performances there. They were to be his last.

He started his journey on January 19, 1794, traveled down the Rhine and arrived in London on February 4. Almost a year later, on February 2, 1795, the Symphony No. 102 was first performed, in the concert-room recently built on to the King's Theater. Haydn's manuscript shows that it was begun late in 1794 and finished early in 1795. The Symphony was a great success and the finale was repeated.

The concert announcement promised an orchestra of more than sixty musicians. It was a huge number for the size of the hall, we think now, but those among us who insist that we should play eighteenth-century music only with small or­chestras, even in our large halls, have forgotten how much eighteenth-century musicians generally admired ·1arge orches­tras. It is true that their symphonies and concertos were often played by small ones with only four violins, but on the rare occasions when they could have forty, they were very happy. Haydn said once, in London, "The orchestra is larger this year, but just as mechanical and ... badly placed."

The famous "Miracle "-Symphony story that some nine­teenth century biographers attached to Symphony No. 96, from Haydn's first London visit, actually belongs to this sym­phony. It was reported in the London news papers that when a large part of the audience got up and pushed forward to the stage for a closer look at Haydn, a great chandeller fell into the vacant seats. "A miracle!" they crled, "a miracle!" By some accident of historiography, "Miracle" became the catch­word title of the wrong symphony.

Haydn enjoyed be lng lionized in London. Honors of every kind were showered on him and he was generously paid for his services as composer, performer and teacher. He often said

later, although it was not quite true, that it was only after his successes in England that he became famous in the German­speaking countries. He left London on August 15, 1795 and returned home by way of Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.

The twelve symphonies Haydn wrote for London are, as a body, his finest. Those of the second trip are generally more original and elevated than the first six, and Nos. 10 2 and 104 (usually called the "London" Symphony) are the best of all.

Symphony No. 102 is obviously the work of a mature master with complete command of his resources and an almost infinite ability to exploit and expand his materials. It is subtle, witty, original and varied in express ion, richly textured, organically formed, and brilliantly written for the orchestra.

A twentieth-century listener can envy the members of that 1795 audience who heard this Symphony for the first time as a piece of modem music. Our acquaintance with so much music written since then makes it too difficult for us to recognize the novelty, the invention in this Symphony that was so striking when it was new.

In the first movement alone, the bold octaves of the opening measure, which are a kind of introduction to the introduction, turn up again as signals of the start of every major section of the movement except--in a masterful stroke of subtle wit--the exposition.

The slow movement is simply a statement of a long melody and then a series of three repetitions, little varied and hardly developed, The third and fourth movements are in the classic forms, using materials to match the rest of the Symphony.

Haydn scored the Symphony for two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

/ / /

Dances from Marosszek ............ Zoltan Kodaly (Born December 16, 1882, in Kecskemet, Hungary; died March 6, 1967 in Budapest)

/ /

Zoltan Kodaly, the son of amateur musicians, began to com-pose at an early age and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree with a study of the structure of Hungarian folk song texts. In 1906, he and Hungary's other great composer, Bela Bartok, began the systematic collection and analysis of Hungarian

folk music that was to be the most powerful single influence on their creative work. One of the principal aims of their researches was to distinguish the music of the Hungarian peasants from that of the Gypsies, and it is the peasant music that permeates their compositions.

/ Marosszek is a district in the Transylvanian border region of

Hungary and Rumania where, Kodaly has written, "most of the old folk dances have been preserved. Until the (First World) War, these pieces could be heard in every village, played either on a violin or on a shephera' s flute, and old people used to sing them. Brahms 's Hungarian Dances are an expression of urban

/ ' Hungary around 1860. My Marosszek Dances have their roots in a much more remote past." (Abridged)

/ In 1923, Kodaly began to work on a concert composition

/ based on the dances of the Marosszek region, and in 1927 he completed it as a long piano piece. He orchestrated it in 1930 at the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the first performance, at a concert of the New York Philharmonic on December 11, 1930.

The score calls for piccolo and two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion and strings.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58 . . . . . . . . . . . Ludwig van Beethoven (Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827 in Vienna)

On November 3, 1836, Robert Schumann wrote: "Today Mendelssohn played the G Major Concerto of Beethoven with a power and polish that transported us all. I received a plea­sure from it such as I have never enjoyed, and I sat in my place without moving a muscle or even breathing--afraid of making the least noise." This was an important performance, for it rescued Beethoven's Fourth Concert from undeserved neglect. Before Mendelssohn revived it, it had been overshadowed by the less difficult Third Concerto and the more imposing Emperor Concerto.

We do not know exactly when the Fourth Concerto was written, but it was probably finished in early 1806. The first performance was given at a private subscription concert in the home of

Beethoven's patron, Prince Lobkowitz, in Vienna, in March, 1807.

It was first presented to the general public at a historic con­cert in the Theater an der Wlen on December 22, 1808. At that musical marathon, a small audience sat huddled in overcoats in an unheated hall for four hours to hear first performances of this imposing group of Beethoven's latest compositions: the Fourth Piano Co:1certo; the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; the aria Ah Perfido!; the Fantasia for piano, chorus, and orchestra; the Sanctus from the Mass in C Major and several shorter works. Although it is almost certain that never before or since have so many important works had their first hearings on one occasion, it is not surprising that this over-long and under-rehearsed pro­gram, in which Beethoven doubled as conductor and piano soloist was no great popular success.

Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto makes great advances over its predecessors. It is no longer a piano showpiece with accompaniment, but a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra. This ls immediately apparent in the opening of the first movement, Allegro moderato, where the piano announces the principal theme alone, then ln answered by the orchestra, the reverse of the classical procedure and a daring innovation.

The ldea of dialogue is carried much further in the second movement, Andante con moto. Here the strings speak ln dra­matic tones and are answered with quiet restraint by the piano until, with quiet persuasion, the soloist finally breaks down the resistance of the strings. The movement subsides and leads without a break, into the cheerful rondo-finale, Vivace, where again there is considerable interplay between piano and orchestra.

Accompanying the solo piano is an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

(Born May 7, 1840, rn Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893 in Saint Petersburg)

Tchaikovsky was a young man and an lnexperienced composer when he started to write a descriptive overture for orchestra based on Shakespeare's Romeo andjuliet, and he went over the

idea with his friend Mily Balakirev, a self- taught composer with extraordinary natural gifts. None of Balakirev' s fine works would earn him a career or a place in history like Tchaikovsky's, but he possessed in abundance one quality that Tchaikovsky completely lacked: self-confidence.

Almost every step in Tchaikovsky's work on this score was taken under his friend's scrutiny. It was Balakirev who sugges­ted the subject, the musical style and form. While the work was in progress, he criticized the themes and their organization, and when Tchaikovsky tired of it and allowed his attention to wander elsewhere, Balakirev steered him back to Romeo.

In November, 1869, the score was done, and in March, 1870, it was given its first performance, by the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Music Society of Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein. Alas, it was a sad failure, and Tchaikovsky (and Balakirev) set to work on a revised version. This was per­formed in Saint Petersburg in 1872, but was still not satisfac­tory. In the summer of 1878, Tchaikovsky briefly considered writing a Romeo and Juliet opera, but then turned back to his failed Overture. By September, 1880, it finally became the Overture-Fantasy we know today, one of the most popular or­chestra c ompositions of the entire nineteenth century.

The musical structure is not very remote from the classic sonata-form, preceded by a slow introduction. Friar Lawrence is depicted in the somber , hymn - like opening and in the main section of the work, the bustling first subject represents the street brawls of the Montagues and Capulets; the lyrical second subject, the two young lovers. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, harp and strings. It is dedicated to Balakirev.

PROGRAM NOTES by Leonard Burkat Copyright 1975

FUTURE EVENTS IN THIS SERIES. • •

JORGE BOLET, Pianist Tuesday, November 8 8:15 p.m.

ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY Santiago Rodriguez, Pianist Sunday, March 19 3:15 p,m.

CANADIAN BRASS QUINTET Tuesday, April 4 8:15 p.m.

PENNSYLVANIA BALLET Sunday, April 23 8:15 p.m.