Program Notes by Jim Yancy

Presenting Itzhak Perlman

April 4, 2009

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)     

Overture to Candide

Candide  opened on December 1, 1956, at the Martin Beck theatre on Broadway.  Adapted from Voltaire’s satire by Lillian Hellman, it had lyrics by Richard Wilbur and others; the director was Tyrone Guthrie.  In spite of such illustrious credentials, the show was a failure, running for only 73 performances.  As it later traveled to the concert stage, it underwent many changes, eventually going back to Broadway and finally to the opera house.  It fits more comfortably into the composer’s original vision of the show as a “kind of operetta, or some version of musical theatre that is basically European but which Americans have long accepted and come to love.”  The Overture had its first concert performance, by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, on January 26, 1957 and became an almost instantaneous orchestra and concert band staple.  The work is extremely quick-paced, with a feverish excitement that begins from the first. The main theme, first played by the strings and woodwinds and marked brilliante, is never again heard in the show.  The rest of the overture draws on Dr. Pangloss’s optimistic philosophy expressed in the song “The Best of All Possible Worlds.”  Also featured in the Overture are themes associated with the battle music for the Hessian invasion of Westphalia, Candide and Cunegonde’s poignant and lyrical wedding-day duet “Oh Happy We,” and Cunedonde’s tour-de-force coloratura aria “Glitter and Be Gay.” An edited version was used as the theme music for The Dick Cavett Show, and the New York Philharmonic performed the Overture to Candide as part of its historic concert in Pyongyang, North Korea on February 26, 2008.

Bernstein         Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

                                    Prologue:  Allegro moderato

                                    “Somewhere”:  Adagio

                                    Scherzo:  Vivace leggiero

                                    Mambo: Presto

                                    Cha-Cha (Maria):  Andantino con grazia

                                    Meeting Scene:  Meno mosso

                                    “Cool”, Fugue:  Allegretto

                                    Rumble:  Molto allegro

                                    Finale:  Adagio

West Side Story, with a book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opened at the Winter Garden Theater on September 26, 1957. It was of course famously adapted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Unlike the unsuccessful Broadway run of Candide a year earlier, this show ran for 772 performances and 253 more when it returned to New York after a tour.  Jerome Robbins was both director and choreographer.  Some commentators felt that West Side Story was the great American opera that composers had been trying to write for decades, but Bernstein felt the work was not an opera, but a bona fide Broadway musical, even though it did break new ground in many ways:  “So much was conveyed in music, including the enormous reliance upon dance to tell plot – not just songs stuck into a book.” The Symphonic Dances were first performed on February 13, 1961, by the New York Philharmonic under Lukas Foss. 

The Prologue depicts the growing rivalry and rising violence between two New York street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.  A dream sequence envisions the two gangs joined in peaceful friendship “Somewhere” beyond the city walls united in a realm of space, air, and sun (Scherzo.)  Real life breaks in at a high school gymnasium dance where the two gangs compete in a Mambo.  Here too the two young lovers, Tony and Maria, see each other for the first time, dance together (Cha-Cha) and speak for the first time (Meeting Scene).  The Jets try to control their nervous violence “Cool,” Fugue, but their hostility breaks out in a climactic gang battle (Rumble) where the rival gang leaders are killed.  The Finale is based on Maria’s “I Have a Love” which recalls the death of Tony and the other young men and the vision of “Somewhere.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)   Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61

                                                                             Allegro ma non troppo

                                                                             Larghetto

                                                                             Rondo:  Allegro

                                                               Itzhak Perlman, violin

For a work held in such august reverence, Beethoven’s only violin concerto endured a premiere redolent more of a carnival atmosphere than of the sanctity of the concert hall.  In 1767, Mozart’s father had commented in a letter about the Viennese character:  “The Viennese – to speak generally – are not eager for anything serious and sensible and have little or no understanding of it.  That they care for nothing but utter trash, burlesques, harlequinades, ghost tricks, farces, and devil’s antics, is well known….”  This seemed somewhat true in 1806 when the first concert performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto took place on December 23.

The soloist was Franz Clement, an eminent virtuoso of the time, but a man given to clownish tricks and shenanigans, such as playing the violin holding it upside down.  To be sure, Beethoven had much admired Clement when the budding violin virtuoso was a young man.  When Beethoven first heard the 14-year-old boy perform in 1794, the composer had written to him:  “Nature and art have combined to make a great artist of you.  Follow them both and, never fear, you will reach greatness, the highest goal that an artist can desire in the world.”  True to Beethoven’s hopes, Clement grew up to become concertmaster and conductor of the Vienna opera, and when he asked Beethoven to contribute a violin concerto for a benefit concert in 1806, Beethoven readily agreed.  The performance was a memorable one, but for the wrong reasons.  Clementi actually played a sonata of his own between the first and second movements of the concerto and, to keep the audience’s attention, played it on one string of a violin held upside down!  For the next thirty years, the concerto was played infrequently, and it was not until Joseph Joachim played it in 1844 under Felix Mendelssohn that the work was fully appreciated.

The first movement begins with four quiet kettledrum taps which in effect introduces the principal motif on which the entire first movement is based, what John N. Burk describes as “giving the whole context a downright, on-the-beat character.”  The mood is relaxed, placid, stately, and symmetrical.  Beethoven unifies the movement by the continued use of this figure.  Scott Goddard noted the lack of boisterous display, comparing the mood to “a fountain intermittently taken by the wind; its outline swayed and its peak broken into feathers of light, while the next moment it plays in its first perfect symmetry.”

The slow movement is a dialogue between the soloist who embroiders with rather florid figures, and the generally unadorned quiet singing of the orchestra. 

The finale opens with a vigorous rondo for the solo instrument soon answered by the orchestra.  This main theme essentially defines the movement with its deft dialogue between the violin and the orchestra, even going so far at one point of having the horns issuing a hunting call to be answered by the violin.  Donald Francis Tovey commented, “…there is no finale which more boldly and accurately gives the range … of the whole, than this most naively humorous of rondos.”