Born September 19, 1942, in Svaliava, Yevhen Stankovych is one of Ukraine’s greatest living composers. A prolific artist in numerous genres, he has written symphonic and chamber works, operas, instrumental and choral pieces, concertos (for violin, cello, flute, and viola), and music for film and musical theater. Steeped in Ukrainian vernacular music, he joined a group of composers known as “the Neofolkloric Wave” early in his career and devoted himself to other Eastern European folk idioms as well, illustrated by his Fantasy on Ukrainian, Armenian and Lithuanian Folk Tunes from 1972. Like his predecessor Prokofiev, who was also Ukrainian born, Stankovych struggled with Soviet censorship, but the collapse of the USSR opened his career up to worldwide performances, contacts, and recordings. He has received numerous awards, including the Hero of Ukraine Medal and the Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s most prestigious award for artistic creativity—for his 1977 Symphony No. 3. The 1982 Chamber Symphony No. 3, the work opening this program, was lauded in 1985 by judges of the International Music Council–UNESCO International Music Prize, which aimed “to serve peace, understanding between peoples, and international cooperation,” a recognition now timelier than ever.
Scored for flute and strings, the single-movement Chamber Symphony No. 3 alternates between two kinds of music: modernist sounds featuring slashing string ostinatos accompanied by a leaping five-note flute figure, and more tonal sections, sometimes of Mahlerian intensity, where the flute and strings try to out-sing each other. The piece opens hesitantly, the dissonant strings pausing for a three-note sigh from the flute, a motif that takes on increasing importance. A mournful, cadenza-like flute song acts as a prelude to the first lyrical section, one of several moments when the strings stop to allow for a solo. The fast music gradually takes on busier counterpoint and offers more colorful effects, the strings slashing rapidly up and down, sometimes simultaneously, the flute soaring into higher registers; at the same time, the slow music becomes more unabashedly tonal and impassioned.
Near the end, the struggle between modernist and Romantic elements begins to lessen, moving toward a reconciliation: The music slows down with quiet pizzicato rhythms and a drooping version of the five-note flute figure. A long major chord—a soulful release from tension—seems to end the piece, but the flute whispers a reprise of its opening motif as the ostinato, no longer aggressive, plucks down into silence, bringing everything together in a satisfying symmetry.
At age 20, Johannes Brahms was hailed by Robert Schumann as the new hero of music, a major creator “ready to break away from small music” and “strike out toward broader horizons.” Taking his mentor at his word, Brahms launched into what eventually became the massive D-Minor Piano Concerto. All three movements move on an epic scale, with surging pulses of energy generating the first movement and finale, and rapt melody spreading in all directions from the hymnlike slow movement. The process of composition was epic as well—painfully so, in fact—consuming nearly five years of Brahms’s life. The piece was conceived as a symphony, converted into a two-piano sonata, and finally re-transcribed into a piano concerto. The original finale was scrapped altogether (later to turn up in Ein deutsches Requiem), and the first two movements were continually revised. Composition was further stalled by R. Schumann’s madness and attempted suicide, which disturbed Brahms deeply, and are widely believed to have contributed to the aura of tragedy in the concerto’s first two movements. Music “gets yanked out of me,” Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann (for whom he wrote the gorgeous slow movement) in 1856. “How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern one evening and writes some fresh music.” The next year, he wrote her that the first movement was a “completely botched job,” bearing “the stamp of dilettantism.”
The public and critics agreed, not only on the first movement but the entire work. The 1859 premiere—even with Brahms playing the solo part and Joseph Joachim conducting—was unsuccessful, and the Leipzig premiere five days later was a disaster. According to Brahms, the audience greeted the work with “unequivocal hissing from all sides,” and the critics damned it as “a symphony with piano obbligato” rather than a true piano concerto. As late as 1879, composer Édouard Lalo, speaking for many, was still grumbling about the piece: “If the solo genre displeases the composer, let him write symphonies … but don’t let him bore me with fragments of solos constantly interrupted by the orchestra.” After the premiere, Brahms himself labeled the concerto “a brilliant and decisive failure.”
All this may seem dismaying, given the freshness and power of what is now such an enormously popular work. The pianist’s electrifying trills in the first movement and virtuoso display throughout hardly seem like “obbligato.” That the piano must compete against Brahms’s dark, massive orchestration makes its contribution more exciting, not less. As for the often-heard complaint against Brahms’s “muddy” orchestration (more characteristic of his early style than later), the liveliest defense comes from Charles Ives, who speculated that “the mud may be a form of sincerity … A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought.” “Sincerity” is indeed a defining feature of this concerto, as it is for many of Brahms’s early works. The scoring creates a sense of struggle and transcendence, as in the restatement of the big theme in the introduction, where brass fanfares soar bravely out of dense string sonorities. In later, lighter works (such as his Second Symphony), the orchestration is more crystalline, but that is not the right sound for this smoldering piece.
Shortly after arriving in America in 1892 to serve as the head of a national conservatory of American music, Antonín Dvořák declared that the most distinctive folk music in the United States came from Black America; only through a recognition of this fundamental fact, he said, could America realize itself musically. Spirituals, he said, were “the folk songs of America.” With their unlimited emotional range and bracing syncopation, they had “all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” Now a commonplace idea, this assertion by a European—made long before W. E. B. Du Bois or George Gershwin—was hugely provocative for its time, yet perfectly in tune with Europe’s embrace of radicals like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, before Americans could deal with them.
Dvořák composed the “New World” Symphony in New York City, with a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha on his music stand and the soulful sounds of spirituals—sung by his most talented student, Harry Burleigh—ringing in his ears. A summer sojourn in Spillville, Iowa, convinced him that Native American chants also were an important part of American music; however, though he built motifs inspired by these chants into the symphony, he regarded spirituals as the “foundation.” As musicologist and critic Henry Krehbiel noted, this assertion caused “much consternation” among the musical intelligentsia, with some claiming that Dvořák simply lifted Black melodies verbatim and others vehemently denying any African American influence whatsoever. Arguments about authenticity—which continue to this day—barely concealed a larger anxiety and outrage over Dvořák’s embrace of African American music. Tastemakers such as journalist James Creelman and critic James Huneker (who claimed the symphony enabled the “evil” development of ragtime) denounced Dvořák’s advocacy of spirituals in explicitly racist terms.
To this day, some critics deny that the Black influence is authentic or assert that the “New World” Symphony is just another Czech-Bohemian symphony. From the beginning, Dvořák stated that he was out to write a symphony that was “distinctly American” in its combination of influences. He declared that his method was to study indigenous melodies until he became so “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics” that he could create his own themes based on their “essence and vitality.”
All these complicated controversies have tended to bury the work’s simple spontaneity and exuberance. Whatever the symphony’s ultimate sources, it has a powerful immediacy, an instantly apprehensible unity of emotion and sensibility. The sense of open spaces and New World freshness is palpable; that the symphony indeed opened up a new world was not doubted by the cheering audience at the 1893 Carnegie Hall premiere or by the president of the New York Philharmonic, who called the occasion “epoch-making” and spoke of the “justness of the title.”
Dvořák’s “Americanness” is apparent in his saturation in spirituals; his creation of a spontaneous, open sound; and his immersion in American poetry. H. L. Mencken—one of the symphony’s strongest defenders—spoke of its “atmosphere of frank savagery,” its syncopated “rush of sounds,” and its “unbroken clarity.” This sprawling exuberance, with themes spilling over from one movement to another and parading by one more time at the end, is set against a powerful homesickness, an excitement about the New World tempered by a longing for the Old. Dvořák fell in love with America during his two-year stay, but he deeply missed his native Bohemia: The big tune in the second movement for English horn became a spiritual called “Goin’ Home,” a metaphor for Dvořák’s nostalgia for his homeland. The middle section of this innovative movement is a somber march evoking Longfellow’s vision of Minnehaha’s funeral, followed by a “Dawn on the Prairie” full of birdsong and brilliant light—a spectacular climax that helped establish the idea of “open sound” in American music.
Couple all this with Dvořák’s link to jazz and the American idioms of Gershwin and Copland—he taught Rubin Goldmark, who mentored the latter two and Ellington as well—and it turns out that Dvořák’s detractors had a great deal to be anxious about. American music was never quite the same after the “New World” Symphony. Dvořák may have been a European, but his American legacy was profound.
—Jack Sullivan