Elena Kats-Chernin

Big Rhap

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic on November 4, 1957 and now resides near Sydney, Australia. Big Rhap was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra led by Bramwell Tovey in Melbourne, Australia on May 25, 2017. It is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contra bassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste and strings (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos and basses).

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Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin was born in 1957 in Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic on November 4, 1957, into a musical family. Her early studies were in the Soviet Union, but she emigrated to Australia at age 18 and enrolled at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, studying piano and composition. After graduating there, she moved to Germany for further study, remaining there for thirteen years and writing music for theaters, ballet companies, small ensembles and orchestras. Since her return to Australia in 1994, she has composed prolifically in all genres. Her music was featured at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, at the 2003 Rugby World Cup and at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. In 2019 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia “for distinguished service to the performing arts, particularly to music, as an orchestral, operatic and chamber music composer.”

Elena Kats-Chernin writes music that is easily understood at first hearing. It is colorful and theatrical, full of large gestures and assertive sounds. Judging by Big Rhap, she never lingers too long on one idea, moving with high energy from one event to another.

The composer has written about this piece, “When I think of Franz Liszt, I think of a virtuoso with an open and seductive nature, and an intriguing composer who was unambiguously dramatic. His music always reminds me of elements like wind, fire and water. My mother used to play the Second Hungarian Rhapsody when we lived in Yaroslavl in Russia. In writing this piece I am transferring my early memories of the spectacle, the merriness and the hyperbole of what I saw and heard in my living room to paper! I didn’t actually consult the score of Rhapsody No.2 so this is not a transcription or an arrangement of the actual notes but a sketch from my young self whose enthusiastic mind’s ear was indeed seduced and enlivened by the high spirits of Liszt’s vision. Certain things imprinted themselves indelibly on my imagination; the noble (and a bit scary) opening that suggests both triumph and treachery, the motoric regularity of the ‘friska’ and the way the ‘lassan’ made me feel the pain of a shivering and wounded heart.”

At the work’s premiere in 2017, one critic wrote, “A well-filtered reminiscence of childhood memories about her mother playing the well-known Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2, the piece has most of the Kats-Chernin trademarks: motor rhythms, simple melodies, lashings of orchestral excitement, just enough hints at the past to bring near-recognition during the relentless forward drive.”

The PSO’s only previous performance of a work by Elena Kats-Chernin, Clocks, took place in April 2021.

– Martin Webster

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Johannes Brahms

Concerto for Violin, Cello, & Orchestra in A minor, Op. 102

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897. He composed this concerto in 1887 and led the first performance by the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne the same year with soloists Joseph Joachim, violin, and Robert Hausmann, cello. The score calls for solo violin, solo cello, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

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Brahms’ decades-long friendship with virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim was, in part, responsible for the composer’s masterful Violin Concerto. Brahms (who wasn’t a violinist) asked his friend to “supervise” the violin part he had written and ended up using many of Joachim’s suggestions. Their friendship was also responsible for Brahms’ Double Concerto (as it is commonly called)—but in a quite different way. For Brahms and Joachim were no longer on speaking terms.

Joachim was an obsessively jealous man, and had accused his wife Amalie of infidelity. She was probably innocent, and Brahms wrote her a warm letter expressing his dismay at her difficulties and, in essence, saying he believed her side of the story. Little did he know that Amalie would produce this letter in open court at her divorce proceedings! Joachim was incensed and would have nothing more to do with Brahms.

A few years into this non-communication Brahms had what he called “a strange notion.” He wrote his publisher: “I must inform you of my latest piece of folly, which is a concerto for violin and cello! Owing to the relations between myself and Joachim I tried to give up the job, but it was no use.” Despite his doubts, Brahms sent a note to Joachim telling him what he was up to and asking if he had any interest. He humbly asked if Joachim and cellist Robert Hausmann might look over the solo parts to see if they were playable. (Not coincidentally, Hausmann had been pestering Brahms for a cello concerto for years.)

It worked. Eventually Hausmann, Joachim, and Brahms (at the piano) read through the work, and before long the soloists appeared in several performances with Brahms conducting. Brahms’ relationship with Joachim dramatically improved, though it would never be quite the same again.

Brahms’ “folly” turns out to be a remarkable piece. It is also unique: no had tried a double concerto in the romantic era. As if to underline the point, Brahms’ first movement turns tradition upside-down. After a dramatic but very short introduction from the orchestra we hear the movement’s cadenzas at the start rather than at the end. Now we get the long orchestral passage we expected before, and as the soloists return they contribute both singly and together. Brahms keeps everything audible with his deft, chamber-music scoring.

A two-note horn call begins the much gentler Andante. Again this is chamber music—the orchestra is not so much a contrast to the soloists as a supporter and partner to them. Balance, color, and sentiment are all exquisitely handled, and worlds away from the stormy first movement.

The Finale opens with genteel folk-like music and a formal scheme that suggests but doesn’t quite constitute a rondo form. There’s more than a whiff of Hungarian Gypsy music here, and the tone is amiable rather than triumphant. As we reach the end of this, Brahms’ last orchestral work, we come to realize that despite all the sheer virtuosity of what we’ve heard, not one note has been for show. The virtuosity has come in the service of music—and perhaps friendship, too.

– Mark Rohr

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Carl Maria von Weber

Overture and March from Turandot

Carl Maria von Weber was born in Eutin, Germany on November 18, 1786 and died in London on June 5, 1826. His incidental music for Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot, in a German translation by Schiller, received its premiere 1809. It is scored for 1 flute, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, timpani, percussion and strings (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos and basses).

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Paul Hindemith

Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber

 Paul Himdemith was born on November 16, 1895 in Hanau, Germany and died on December 28, 1963 in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany. His Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber was first heard in performance by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in January, 1944, with Artur Rodzinski on the podium. It is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contra bassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos and basses). It was last performed by the Portland Symphony Orchestra during its 90th Anniversary celebration concert, led by former music director Toshi Shimada.

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Before tonight’s performance of Paul Hindemith’s great orchestral showpiece, Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, Music Director Eckart Preu has chosen to perform the music that inspired the second movement of Hindemith’s work. It is music that Weber wrote to accompany the play Turandot, by Carlo Gozzi (the play that also inspired Giacomo Puccini’s opera of the same name). Weber in turn found his theme in a Dictionnaire de la Musique by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where it was labeled simply “air chinois”. 

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) is a major figure in early German Romantic Opera. In his brief life, he wrote several operas that were popular well into the 20th century. Considering how rarely we hear his music nowadays, his influence on later generations of German composers was surprisingly far-reaching. 

Hindemith, whose extremely personal brand of modernism is light-years from Weber’s slightly prim musical language, seems an unlikely Weber enthusiast, but when he was asked to provide music for a dance work in 1941, he went to Weber’s piano music for inspiration. Along with the “Chinese air”, he chose to orchestrate three works originally for piano duet. When the dance collaboration went sour, Hindemith rescored his music into the work we hear tonight, something splashy, slightly vulgar, bright hued and entertaining. It was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in January 1944 and remains the composer’s best known and most popular work.

Violist, composer, educator and conductor Paul Hindemith worked with tremendous energy throughout his life, leaving important volumes on music education, valuable recordings of his own and other composers’ music, and a huge amount of music. He intended his music to be useful, providing repertoire for instruments rarely heard in solo guise. He did so in a musical language reached through intense intellectual effort: it refers to much of German musical history but follows an individual path at the same time. Hindemith was uncompromising in his craft, unwilling to soften sharp edges to please the public or the authorities. When the Nazis declared his music degenerate, he left Germany with his wife, settling for some years in the United States, and then in Switzerland. His years of teaching at Yale University were tremendously influential. An entire generation of American composers learned to think in his terms before moving in their own directions.

– Mark Rohr

Mark Rohr was the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s Bass Trombonist from the mid-1980’s and program annotator from 1991 until his passing in 2019. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes at his bequest.