“What music is really about is love and sorrow and the whole range of human emotion—making audible the whole range of human existence and human life.”
– Paul Moravec
Today’s program reflects Moravec’s statement and sparkles with emotion, ebullience, life, challenge, and remembrance.
Never good with his finances, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria) lived it up during high times, renting out extravagant apartments and appointing them with the best of everything, and struggled through fallow periods, begging friends for money. When 1786 rolled around, he was in a rough place. Mozart’s publisher Hoffmeister had recently commissioned three piano quartets, but after the first of the group, the Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, failed with the public due to its technical demands, he wrote to Mozart imploring him: “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!” Mozart, ever the savvy adult, responded reasonably: “Then I will write nothing more, and go hungry, or may the devil take me!” Hoffmeister let him keep the money already paid, but the commission ended there. For reasons unknown – there is no record that the work was commissioned or written for a specific occasion – Mozart wrote another piano quartet anyway: the Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K.493. It was no less challenging than the first. Ironically, it is far more upbeat, filled with lively, joyful, and imaginative music that belies the difficulties Mozart was facing in his personal life.
In a commission gone right, Artistic Director Marya Martin asked Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec (born November 2, 1957, Buffalo, NY) to write a piece in honor of her mother, Nancye, who passed away in 2003. The beautiful and nuanced Nancye’s Song for Flute and Piano was the result. The title was simply Moravec’s placeholder as he was composing the work, but when he asked Martin what she wanted to title the work, she was touched by the humble simplicity of Moravec’s working title, feeling that it perfectly reflected her mother. Meditative and elegiac, the work helped Martin traverse a difficult time, not just the grief of her mother’s passing thousands of miles away in her homeland of New Zealand, but also coming to grips with a shifting identity away from her native New Zealand and towards her citizenship in the US.
Moravec and Martin have had a long and fruitful musical partnership, resulting in the creation of several new works including Chamber Symphony (2007) and A New Country (2018). Nancye’s Song took on new life in BCM’s 2022 commission, The Wings of the Morning. Moravec reorchestrated the work for flute, string quartet, and piano, and added two additional movements, creating a larger work that allows Nancye’s memory to continue to resonate with audiences.
Mozart and Dmitri Shostakovich (born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia; died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia) had a lot in common. Both were child prodigies, could compose with incredible speed, were wonderful pianists, and were, at times, at odds with the powers that be. In 1934, Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, scandalized with its lusty and lurid musical depictions of sex; there may have also been a secretive message about the genocide of the kulaks, landowning Russian peasants who Stalin ordered to be “liquidated as a class.” Millions were killed or starved to death between 1930-1933. So when Stalin stopped in to catch a performance of Shostakovich’s opera while it was on tour two years after the premiere, a rather disturbing article appeared in the paper the next day, purportedly written by Stalin himself (he apparently moonlighted as a music critic when he wasn’t killing his own people). The article decreed that the opera was “muddle instead of music,” and “it might end very badly [for Shostakovich].” This was the first time Shostakovich received a sharp reprimand from the state, but not the last. Fast forward to 1938, and Shostakovich was trying his hand at string quartets for the first time. The Beethoven Quartet would premiere his first quartet and all but one of the subsequent 14 quartets Shostakovich wrote. The members of the quartet were so thrilled with the finished product that they suggested Shostakovich write a piano quintet so they could all perform together. He obliged. What resulted from this happy collaboration is the Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57, one of the finest works for piano and strings, rivaling the Schumann, Dvořák, and Brahms quintets for pure musical satisfaction.
In five movements, the work opens with a dramatic piano solo soon to be joined by the strings in a fervent response, before a lighter second melody ensues, setting up the core duality of this work, which moves between shadow and light, exploring both ends of the spectrum with depth and beauty. The following Fugue starts out delicate and nostalgic before breaking into a full blown cry with material reminiscent of the work’s opening, but it never becomes morose or indulgent. As a startling foil, the Scherzo movement is a burst of joy. Bright and cheery and slightly out of control, the listener is carried along for a fantastic and frantic ride. Once again, we dive back into darker territory with the hushed and reflective Intermezzo before moving directly into the Finale, a tour de force that brings together all of the elements of the work before coming to a gentle and optimistic end. The work was very well received by the public, and Shostakovich also found himself back in the good graces of the Communist party. The work was awarded the coveted “Stalin Prize,” which came with it an award of 100,000 rubles. All’s well that ends well?
–ML