R. Strauss - Don Juan
Prokofiev - Symphony No. 6
"Daniil Trifonov made his Carnegie Hall debut in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. He reunites with them for another composer’s first concerto—his own. Trifonov’s Piano Concerto has pianistic flash, but also introspection and great tenderness. Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 looks inward too—especially in the anguished central Largo—but also excites with powerful outer movements. Strauss’s Don Juan is pure excitement: Sumptuously scored, brilliantly melodic, it’s the tone poem that propelled him to the front rank of composers."
RICHARD STRAUSS
Don Juan, Op. 20
A Sunset Mistaken for a Sunrise
One of the earliest observers to see the Wagner revolution in perspective was Debussy, who declared that Wagner was a "beautiful sunset who has been mistaken for a sunrise." The truth of this striking assessment is most tellingly apparent in the Wagnerian tone poems of Richard Strauss, which were considered "modern" when they first appeared, but became old-fashioned soon after in the face of newer revolutions wrought by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Debussy himself. A disciple of Wagner—in whom he declared "music reached its greatest capacity for expression"—Strauss pushed Wagnerian lushness and chromaticism to a glorious extreme that became a cul de sac. By the early 20th century, the "modern" school of Wagner was as dated as the "conservative" school of Brahms.
A New Form for Every Subject
It is certainly hard to see how anyone—except Strauss himself in Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben—could outdo the Wagnerian fireworks of Don Juan, the first of Strauss's tone poems to be performed. The fantasia structure of this seductive work (a freewheeling rondo stretched to the breaking point) looks back to the tone poems of Liszt, but as far as Strauss was concerned, the real inspiration was late Beethoven. In an 1888 letter to his mentor Hans von Bülow (a year before Strauss conducted the premiere of Don Juan), Strauss referred to Beethoven as an example of a revolutionary who "for a new content" had to "devise a new form." His own goal was also, he wrote, "to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject."
The forms of the tone poems do indeed demonstrate tremendous variety and appropriateness to their content: The transfiguration section of Death and Transfiguration has an expansiveness that seems to stretch into infinity; the penultimate section of Ein Heldenleben, which looks back over the hero's achievements, spins out an elaborate pastiche of motifs from earlier Strauss works (like Wagner, Strauss was not especially modest). The structure of Don Juan is tighter, more compact, than either of these: The passionate energy of Don Juan erupts, conquers, then quickly burns itself out.
The Roguish Versus the Tragic
Yet it is surely gratuitous to attempt, as some program-obsessed critics have done, to read a specific incident from the story of Don Juan into every phrase of Strauss's music. By titling every theme, commentators have reduced the music to a labeling game. Even Strauss, whom Mahler once judged to be too tied to his programs, was not
that literal.
Indeed, Strauss stated that the music followed only the "emotional phases" of the legendary lover as they are suggested in excerpts (appended to the score) from a 19th-century poem by Nikolaus Lenau. To Lenau, Don Juan was less a "hot-blooded man eternally pursuing women" than an idealist searching for an unattainable Ideal Woman and eventually suffering disillusionment, despair, and a suicidal death. (Lenau himself suffered a grim death in a lunatic asylum shortly after composing this poem.) In keeping with this concept, Strauss's tone poem has the requisite roguish sensuality, but also a heroic, decidedly serious thrust, with a genuinely tragic sense of catastrophe at the end.
A Closer Listen
The work is densely packed with ideas, beginning with a brilliant, almost screaming introduction followed by a gallant theme (suggestive of Don Juan) that gallops over brass and woodwinds. These are less melodies than pungent Wagnerian motifs, which reappear and dissipate throughout the piece, often combined contrapuntally or crushed into even smaller cells-a fragmentation that surely signals the impending breakup of the whole magnificent Wagnerian machine.
In contrast with these slashes of melody are three languorous love episodes that allow the strings and the solo oboe and clarinet to show off in the most elegant way imaginable. (It is no accident that Strauss was falling in love with Pauline de Ahna, the love of his life, as he was composing Don Juan.) Following the third episode, the horns blare out a new, more exalted Don Juan theme, signaling a wild carnival scene and leading to a wonderfully sustained blast from the orchestra that shuts off into sudden silence. The coda is a bleak winding down in A minor darkened further by a dissonant note from the trumpet. A final, morbid thump from the trombones ends the work.
—Jack Sullivan
DANIIL TRIFONOV
Piano Concerto in E-flat Minor
Taking after his father, a composer, Daniil Trifonov began crafting his own music at the age of five—even before he began studying piano. His introduction to the world stage as a virtuoso pianist came in 2011, when the 20-year-old took first prize at both the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Trifonov balanced his burgeoning international career with studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, an environment that nurtured his creativity both as a composer and as an interpreter of existing music.
The school commissioned Trifonov's Piano Concerto, and its president, Joel Smirnoff, conducted the first performance in 2014 with the composer as soloist. Trifonov has since performed his own concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra in St. Petersburg, and also with the Kansas City Symphony. This tour with the Mariinsky Orchestra brings the concerto to the East and West coasts of the US for the first time.
With his Piano Concerto in E-flat Minor, Trifonov revives the grand tradition of the virtuoso composer-performer that only faded in the latter part of the 20th century. From Mozart and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, top composers understood the dazzling power of keyboard concertos written with their own hands in mind. And for Trifonov, whose hands are capable of feats that few humans (living or dead) could match, the concerto functions as a magnifying lens for his own musicianship in all its technical wizardry and tender emotion.
Like most effective music written by 23-year-olds, Trifonov's concerto owns its influences unabashedly. From Rachmaninoff's concertos, it borrows a late-Romantic approach to tonality, a penchant for singing melodies, and a knack for interweaving keyboard and orchestral textures, ranging from delicate interludes to thunderous climaxes. Other passages hint at the kaleidoscopic chromaticism of another Russian icon, Alexander Scriabin. During a marching passage in the first movement, and again in sassy violin solos during the finale, traces arise of Prokofiev and his winking humor.
The form follows a traditional three-movement arc, its continuity supported by subtle thematic links and a direct connection into the finale from the second movement (which Trifonov describes as an "intermezzo"). The mischievous finale, with its syncopated dance themes and its gleeful arrival in the major key, makes a dashing impression. We can only hope that a sequel will require us to relabel this work as Trifonov's First Piano Concerto before too long.
—Aaron Grad
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Symphony No. 6 in E-flat Minor, Op. 111
A Hard Road Toward Acceptance
Because of its complexity and emotional ambiguity, Prokofiev's Sixth was for many years regarded as a "problem" symphony, the most "difficult" work from the composer's Soviet period. Only recently has it come into its own. Yet its quirky mood swings and refusal to provide easy closure are problematic only when set against the grandeur of the popular Fifth and the childlike tunefulness of the Seventh. Relentlessly prodded by Soviet censors, Prokofiev had allegedly mellowed and become less "modern" in his late period, so the neo-modernist Sixth was a shock, even though it is by no means as biting and sardonic as early revolutionary works like
They Are Seven,
The Love for Three Oranges, and the
Scythian Suite. Coming after the Fifth, Prokofiev's greatest triumph and an enduring template for the inspirational wartime symphony, the Sixth had too much to live up to. The Soviets wanted "music of the people," and denounced the symphony not only for what it was, but for what it could have been.
Ironically, there was no war to write inspirational music for even if Prokofiev had wanted to. He began the Sixth while completing the Fifth, but had to postpone completing it for two years because of a collapse down a flight of stairs that landed him in a hospital and greatly slowed down his normally rapid pace of composition (he had dashed off the Fifth in less than a month).
A Sober Reassessment
Prokofiev called the Fifth a "hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit." The Sixth is a sober re-assessment, not just in the music, but in what Prokofiev said about it: "Now we are rejoicing in our great victory, but each of us has wounds that cannot be healed. One man's loved ones have perished, another has lost his health. This must not be forgotten." Eschewing patriotic tub-thumping, the elegiac Sixth was Prokofiev's way of ensuring that the wounds of war "would not be forgotten."
The Two Prokofievs
The Soviet authorities were not impressed. After the premiere in 1947 (which enjoyed a respectful if not enthusiastic reception), one of Stalin's henchmen accused Prokofiev of believing in "'innovation for innovation's sake.' He has an artistic snobbishness, a false fear of being commonplace and ordinary. It is curious to observe the struggle of the two Prokofievs in a work like his Sixth Symphony. Here the melodious, harmonious Prokofiev is often attacked, without provocation, by the other, storming Prokofiev."
In a perverse way, the criticism is correct. "Innovation for innovation's sake" is probably a badge Prokofiev would be proud to wear in a period when the heady experimentation and quick inspiration of his early period had dissipated. And there actually is a struggle between "two Prokofievs" in the Sixth, not unlike the battle between two Mahlers in his later symphonies. That tension is precisely what gives the symphony its fascination and power.
The attacks only got worse. In early 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused Prokofiev of "formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies alien to the Soviet people and to their aesthetic requirements." The "aesthetic requirements" of the American people were apparently different. The Sixth vanished from the Soviet repertory, but the New York Philharmonic played the work in 1949, followed by performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (Eugene Ormandy's sonorous 1950 recording with Philadelphia is a landmark LP.) Later, Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky recorded the Sixth in Russia, and it is currently championed by Valery Gergiev.
About the Music
This is a symphony full of violent contrasts. The audacious, spitting brasses that open the symphony support the Soviets' "formalist perversions" charge, as do the brassy, maniacal marches—the "storming Prokofiev"—that clamor through the middle of the movement. The "wounds that won't heal" are starkly apparent in the winding, haunting main tune.
Opening the second movement is an anguished outburst that seems a follow-up to the desolate fade-out in the opening movement, but soon the music blossoms into the songful style that made Prokofiev such a popular composer with
Cinderella and
Romeo and Juliet, and belying the work's fearsome reputation. Particularly beguiling is a tune for strings that keeps unwinding new beauties in the kind of long, languid paragraph Prokofiev favored late in life. No one knows where these melodies will end, and no one wants them to.
This welcome lyricism is brashly interrupted by ominous drums and fanfares, a pattern of disruption that recurs throughout the symphony. The exuberant Vivace finale'—with its twirling woodwinds, silvery strings, and Prokofiev-style wit—is also undermined by shadowy apparitions of music from the first movement, first desolately quiet, then screamingly anguished. The shattering coda blows all this away without really resolving the tensions the work sets loose. It's visceral and exciting, one of Prokofiev's blowout endings, but we're left with a haunted residue. The wounds are not healed.
—Jack Sullivan
