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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GIANCARLO GUERRERO, conductorGARRICK OHLSSON, piano

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVENConcerto No. 5 in E-flat major for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 73, “Emperor”

AllegroAdagio un poco mossoRondo: Allegro

Garrick Ohlsson, piano

INTERMISSION

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHSymphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, The Year 1905

The Palace Square: AdagioThe 9th of January: AllegroIn Memoriam: AdagioThe Tocsin: Allegro non troppo – Allegro

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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY PERFORMS

Beethoven’s E m pe ro r

WITH GARRICK OHLSSON

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TONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Concerto for Piano No. 5 in E-flat major, “Emperor”

• The Fifth Piano Concerto was Beethoven’s last, and it was the only one in which he did not perform as the soloist at the premiere, due to the fact that his hearing had already started deteriorating. Beethoven dedicated this piece and 13 others to his friend and patron the Archduke Rudolf of Austria. The composer himself did not attach the nickname “Emperor” to this concerto — in fact, there’s a good chance he would have hated it. The piece was composed in 1809, at a time when the emperor Napoleon’s troops were bombarding Beethoven’s Vienna, causing much destruction and turmoil.

• Throughout his career, Beethoven frequently reimagined and revolutionized classical forms, and this piece is a perfect example: Unlike most concertos, where the cadenza (or solo display) is found at the end of the first movement, Beethoven’s Emperor opens with a series of cadenzas, as the piano soloist plays elaborate flourishes between broad orchestral chords. This sets up the majestic character of the piece, which is composed in E-flat major — the same key as the “Eroica” Symphony No. 3.

• With a career spanning a half-century, soloist Garrick Ohlsson is one of America’s most renowned musicians, and he remains a gripping, authoritative performer. His career received a major boost in 1970, when he was named winner of the Chopin International Piano Competition, but his command of Beethoven is every bit as masterful. New York Times critic James Oestreich once wrote, “The ‘Emperor’ Concerto could have been written for Mr. Ohlsson, so well does it suit his muscular technique and the sensitivity and restraint with which he deploys it.”

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 11 in G minor, The Year 1905

• Throughout his lifetime, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich labored under the watchful eye of the Soviets, particularly during the brutal rule of Josef Stalin. At various times, the composer fell out of favor with the regime, as his music was perceived as pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. But he always managed to reestablish his reputation with works that, at least on the surface, assumed an air of patriotism. His Symphony No. 11 is a perfect example. The piece is subtitled The Year 1905, in tribute to those who perished and suffered in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

• Shostakovich himself had a personal connection to the 1905 revolution: His father and uncle had been part of the “Bloody Sunday” march of protesters who were brutally fired upon by Czarist forces that year. This incident is depicted in the work’s second movement, and the symphony also uses material from nine Russian revolutionary songs, which Shostakovich grew up hearing sung around the house.

• After its premiere in 1957, Shostakovich’s Eleventh garnered instant acclaim in Russia. The following year, it was awarded the Lenin Prize — the Soviet Union’s most prestigious honor, recognizing advancements in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

• Because of its programmatic qualities, Shostakovich’s Eleventh has been called “a film score without the film.”

JOSEF STALIN

BLOODY SUNDAY, 1905

ARCHDUKE RUDOLF OF AUSTRIA

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Composed: 1809First performance: November 28, 1811, in Leipzig, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and soloist Friedrich Schneider First Nashville Symphony performance: January 25, 1949, at War Memorial Auditorium with Music Director William Strickland and soloist Clifford Curzon Estimated length: 38 minutes

Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”

Born on December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany; died on March 26, 1827, in Vienna

The reason Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 carries an italicized subtitle while that of

Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto is in quotes (“Emperor”) is easy to explain: the Russian composer himself published the piece as The Year 1905; Beethoven did not tag his last piano concerto with a subtitle. “Emperor” was added on posthumously (and only in the English-speaking world). If anything, the nickname would have probably irked the composer, at least to the extent that it implies a glorification of the emperor of the time, Napoleon, and his relentless quest for power.

Napoleon and his troops were in fact making Beethoven’s life hell precisely when he was in the midst of thinking up this music. Following their bombardment of Vienna in the spring of 1809, Beethoven angrily described the destructive misery caused by war. Amid the crumbling foundations of the old Habsburg order and the ensuing economic chaos, Haydn’s death in that troubled year must have underscored the sense of an era coming to its end.

Yet for all the external turmoil, Beethoven composed music of sweeping (indeed majestic) grandeur in the Fifth Concerto. Its outer movements are set in E-flat major — the composer’s signature key for evoking an attitude of heroic striving. The musical language here

makes use of a “militaristic” rhetoric. Mozart’s grandest piano concertos had done something similar with their march-like, trumpet-and-drum-reinforced first movements. Beethoven presses that to further extremes here: the dotted rhythm that adds “kick” to the first movement’s main theme emphasizes its “macho” assertiveness.

The Beethoven scholar Leon Plantinga argues that, beneath the surface, Beethoven engages in a subtle symbolism by turning the martial element — which was at this time impinging on the composer’s daily life — into something metaphorical. The overbearing presence of armed conflict during this period “may have reminded him (and now us) of a generalized human struggle,” Plantinga writes. In other words: instead of glorifying any particular figure, such as Napoleon, the “Emperor” uses “heroic gestures” to suggest “a nobility of character required to prevail.”

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

This is one of the most grandiose of concerto beginnings: an outburst of orchestral chords

alternating with solo cadenzas. A prelude that sets the stage for the real business of the first movement, this introductory section also serves as a microcosm for the whole piece. Alongside the extroverted confidence of the orchestra’s three sustained chords, the piano’s flourishes inject an air of leisurely fantasy and even, in its third flight, a hint of otherworldly introspection. The rest of the large-scale first movement unfolds less as a “heroic” struggle than as an ongoing dialogue between these two impulses: dynamic momentum on the one hand, relaxed musing on the other. Only once, at the climax of the development, does a real sense of crisis threaten, preparing the way for a glorious recapitulation of the opening cadenzas.

Progressive deafness had by now put an end to Beethoven’s virtuoso career — the Fifth is the only piano concerto he was unable to perform himself at the premiere. An implied retreat from the world’s cares suffuses the Adagio with a serene, veiled beauty that perfectly counterbalances the energetic exertions of the outer movements. In contrast to the spirit of dialogue in the first movement, the harmonic language here remains

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static while the piano’s exquisite decorations revisit its dreamy impulses heard earlier, but as if in slow motion.

At the end of this Adagio, Beethoven enacts one of his most magical transitions simply by having the bassoons move down by a semitone, from B to B-flat, to provide a natural springboard back to the home key of E-flat for the finale. The piano first spells out its main subject, which plays on a characteristically jaunty rondo theme, now rendered more aggressive by Beethoven’s propulsive accentuation. Forward-pushing dynamism once again brushes up against dazzlingly virtuosic rumination. The composer saves a thrilling theatrical surprise for the end, when the music comes nearly to a standstill — the timpani alone insisting on a beat — before the piano’s fierce cascade of scales leads the way to the exuberant finish.

In addition to solo piano, the score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

Composed: 1956-57First performance: October 30, 1957, with Natan Rakhlin conducting the USSR State Symphony Orchestra in Moscow First Nashville Symphony performance: December 2 & 3, 2005, with guest conductor Stefan Sanderling Estimated length: 60 minutes

Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, The Year 1905

Born on September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow

It’s no exaggeration to say that composing music — like writing novels and poetry, or directing

plays and films — could be a life-or-death matter

under the shadow of Stalin in the Soviet era. No composer understood this better than Dmitri Shostakovich.

In 1936, before he’d even reached 30, Shostakovich was the preeminent young composer, internationally heralded and seemingly unstoppable. He first won widespread attention while still in his teens with the reception of his First Symphony. That piece had been written as a graduation exercise from the Conservatory of his native St. Petersburg, only to be championed by the likes of Bruno Walter, who conducted it in Berlin in 1928.

There were, of course, mixed successes and outright failures along the way. Young Shostakovich’s first full-length opera, a Gogol-inspired, absurdist farce called The Nose (1928), earned nasty reviews from the official Soviet critics. Even so, a few years later, a New York Times correspondent reported that he was “on the way to becoming a kind of composer-laureate to the Soviet state.” Biographer Laurel E. Fay remarks that Shostakovich had been elevated to the level of a “model young Soviet composer,” while at the same time still able to absorb influences from major avant-garde figures of the “decadent” West (Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and the recently deceased Alban Berg, for example).

Shostakovich’s next big opera was a massive hit. Based on a sordid tale of lust, murder, and betrayal, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District featured a wildly inventive score that was labeled “pornophony” by one American critic. Multiple productions were running in the Soviet Union when the official Communist newspaper Pravda published the most notorious music review of the last century. Cast in the form of an anonymous editorial that was likely written by Stalin himself, Pravda’s verdict warned the composer that he was dabbling in “formalism” — art that challenged the comfort zone — and sternly cautioned: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

The resulting trauma set the course for the rest of Shostakovich’s life — including his approach to the symphony and his withdrawal from the field of opera, for which he was so naturally suited. The composer managed to reinstate himself into good graces through the positive reception of his Fifth Symphony (1937), which remains the most popular of his works. But the genre of the

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symphony in general remained a potentially dangerous undertaking, for it was above all equated with making a large public statement: the musical equivalent of an ambitious mural commissioned for a government building.

Shostakovich received a further boost in status with the overwhelming success of his wartime Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), but another denunciation followed after the war, in 1948. Once again, Shostakovich was vindicated by the success of his bold Tenth Symphony — his first to be premiered after Stalin’s death in 1953.

The Eleventh Symphony, which we hear tonight, brought the composer even more acclaim when it was premiered in 1957. The Year 1905 refers to the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, a tragic precursor of the successful Bolshevik Revolution 12 years later. Thanks to its topic, the work was regarded as a return to the ostensibly patriotic stance of the Seventh. The Seventh, after all, had won international fame as an artistic counterattack to Hitler’s devastating Siege of Leningrad (and also earned Shostakovich a place on the cover of Time magazine).

In the Eleventh Shostakovich chose a four-movement plan to chart the tragic narrative of the 1905 Revolution, though only the second movement refers specifically to the historical events of that year; the rest is “atmosphere” and reflection.

As with so much of this composer’s music, any glimpse beneath the surface opens up multiple — and contradictory — interpretive possibilities. The writer David Hurwitz observes that the Eleventh has sometimes been regarded as a retrogression for Shostakovich following the daring and “formal mastery” of the Tenth. This score, which won the Lenin Prize in 1958, has even been dismissed as a kind of artistic selling-out by embracing “the tenets of Socialist Realism.”

And yet, Hurwitz adds, others have heard in the Eleventh a dissident commentary on the

ANY GLIMPSE BENEATH THE SURFACE OF SHOSTAKOVICH’S MUSIC OPENS UP MULTIPLE INTERPRETIVE POSSIBILITIES.

contemporary Hungarian uprising of 1956, which was crushed by Soviet might. Notes Laurel Fay, “Put simply, Shostakovich did not approach the Eleventh Symphony as a propagandistic potboiler. The evils of tyranny and oppression with which the symphony deals are a pervasive theme in his music, one he well knew is timeless and universal.”

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Overall, the music of the Eleventh suggests a cinematic quality in place of the rigorous

give-and-take of more conventional symphonic logic. The four movements even segue from one to the next, like scenes in a film. This cinematic character is immediately obvious from the “scene-setting” accomplished by the first movement, subtitled “The Palace Square” — referring to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, the symbolic residence of the Imperial Family. It was here that crowds of working-class protestors converged on “Bloody Sunday” (January 22, 1905) to petition for better conditions; Imperial soldiers fired on the unarmed demonstrators, killing and wounding hundreds and possibly more.

Shostakovich begins with gloomy harmonic clouds from divided strings and harp, which then lead to a fanfare and a triplet idea given to the timpani. This music recurs across the movement, in alternation with quotations of two revolutionary songs. A hallmark of the Eleventh is Shostakovich’s incorporation of tunes from folk and revolutionary songs that his audience would have recognized.

The second (and longest) movement, “The Ninth of January,” comprises several sections: the assembling of the hapless demonstrators and, to genuinely terrifying strains whipped into a frenzy by the orchestra, the violence of “Bloody Sunday.” This is followed by a chilling version of the music associated with the Palace Square.

In “Eternal Memory,” the third movement, Shostakovich reflects on the implications of this violence —suggesting a critique, some argue, of the very Soviet authorities his “patriotic” music would be assumed to glorify. It’s often noted that the composer himself was born in 1906 and that his generation and its dreams could be associated with the failed promise of the Revolution of the

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preceding year. Funereal and elegiac, and clearly indebted to Shostakovich’s beloved Mahler (as are other aspects of the Eleventh), the movement builds to a fierce climax before subsiding tragically.

The final movement, “The Tocsin” or “Alarm,” starts off with what Hurwitz aptly describes as a Mahlerian “march fantasia” drawing on a medley of revolutionary tunes. Eventually this leads to a powerful climax and, yet again, the music associated with the Palace Square, followed by a deeply mournful solo for English horn and then a sinister one for bass clarinet. The march music returns and rallies to another dark climax, now accompanied by the sounding of the alarm.

Whether heard as triumph or, as Hurwitz suggests, “high panic,” this dramatic conclusion of the Eleventh leaves the audience with a sense of fate still hanging in the balance — of history to be made. “Although it outwardly reflects the dictates of the Socialist Realist aesthetic,” argues Hurwitz, “the Eleventh Symphony is in fact the darkest and most tragic of all of Shostakovich’s purely orchestral works.”

The Eleventh Symphony is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, xylophone, tubular bells, celesta, 2 harps, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ELEVENTH LEAVES THE AUDIENCE WITH A SENSE OF FATE HANGING IN THE BALANCE — OF HISTORY TO BE MADE.

ABOUT THE SOLOIST

GARRICK OHLSSON, piano

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970

Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick

Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, he commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. He has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century.

Ohlsson’s 2015/16 season includes recitals in Berkeley, New York, Indianapolis and Seattle. In return visits to Australia, he will appear in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and he will appear for the first time with the New Zealand Symphony. With concerti as diverse as Beethoven, Brahms, Barber, and Busoni, he can be heard with orchestras in Boston, Los Angeles, Ottawa, Indianapolis, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Manchester (U.K.), and Lugano (Switzerland). He recently served as a judge at the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, and earlier this month he joined the Takács Quartet for a brief East Coast tour.

A native of White Plains, N.Y., Ohlsson began his piano studies at age 8 at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered The Juilliard School in New York City. Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal, that brought him worldwide recognition. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994. He is also the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University.