Jennifer Higdon has long enjoyed a special relationship with The Philadelphia Orchestra, which during the past two decades has performed her music more often than that of any other living composer, including four world premieres. The concert tonight opens with her buoyant Fanfare Ritmico, a six-minute tour-de-force that she wrote in 1999.
Born in Brooklyn to artistic parents, Higdon grew up in Atlanta before moving to Tennessee at age 10. She initially played percussion (something that left clear traces in many of her compositions) before teaching herself the flute. She went on to major in flute performance at Bowling Green State University and then, with the encouragement of one of her teachers, began to compose. Her somewhat late start led to graduate training at the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her Ph.D. Among her teachers were Wallace DePue, George Crumb, and Ned Rorem.
Higdon is one of the most-often-performed American composers of our time. Her many honors include a Grammy Award in 2010 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto, which was co-commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, and a Pulitzer Prize the same year for her Violin Concerto. Two additional Grammys followed for her Viola Concerto and Harp Concerto. Higdon has received further awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pew Fellowship, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other organizations.
The Philadelphia Orchestra has performed nine of Higdon’s pieces, five as co-commissions and four being world premieres. She has served as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, a position she has also held with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. She has been commissioned by many other leading orchestras and ensembles, including the Chicago, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras; The Cleveland Orchestra; Minnesota Orchestra; and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well such groups as the Tokyo String Quartet, the Ying Quartet, and Eighth Blackbird. She has composed pieces for baritone Thomas Hampson, pianists Yuja Wang and Gary Graffman, and violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Jennifer Koh, and Hilary Hahn.
Fanfare Ritmico was commissioned by the Women’s Philharmonic, a pathbreaking all-women’s orchestra based in San Francisco that until its disbanding in 2004 performed mainly music by women, including many world premieres. Higdon composed the work as part of its “Fanfares Project,” and the piece was unveiled in March 2000 with Apo Hsu conducting. Joshua Kosman, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, commented that “the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s zippy, enchanting Fanfare Ritmico started the concert off with a bang. Written for the orchestra as one of a series of commissioned fanfares, Higdon’s score is a brisk, sharp-edged concoction, full of rhythmic pizzazz and blunt orchestral writing.” Other critics followed suit, and the work has enjoyed countless performances, including in a version for wind ensemble that Higdon later crafted.
The brief single-movement piece brims with non-stop energy initiated by the large battery of percussion instruments that plays continuously. As with so many of her compositions, the work has a complexly modern sound while being immediately engaging. Higdon says of the work:
Fanfare Ritmico celebrates the rhythm and speed (tempo) of life. Writing this work on the eve of the move into the new millennium, I found myself reflecting on how all things have quickened as time has progressed. Our lives now move at speeds much greater than what I believe anyone would have ever imagined in years past. Everyone follows the beat of their own drummer, and those drummers are beating faster and faster on many different levels. As we move along day to day, rhythm plays an integral part of our lives, from the individual heartbeat to the lightning speed of our computers. This fanfare celebrates that rhythmic motion, of man and machine, and the energy which permeates every moment of our being in the new century.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Sergei Rachmaninoff pursued multiple professional careers and juggled different personal identities, often out of joint with the realities of his time and place. He was a Russian who fled his country after the 1917 Revolution and who lived in America and Europe for the rest of his life. He was a great composer who, in order to support himself and his family, spent most of his time performing, both as a conductor and as one of the supreme pianists of the 20th century. And he was a Romantic composer writing in the age of burgeoning Modernism, his music embraced by audiences but seemingly coming from a bygone world alien to the stylistic innovations of Debussy, Schoenberg, Ives, Stravinsky, and other contemporaries.
Rachmaninoff worried at times that his triple professional profile might cancel each other out. He was an unusually accomplished performer in two domains at a time when there was in any case an increasing separation between performer and composer. Rachmaninoff, in the great tradition of Mozart and Beethoven through Strauss and Mahler, was the principal performing advocate of his own music. And yet even when he was out of sync with time and place, he pressed on with a grueling performance schedule (sometimes 70 or more concerts in a year) and composed some of the most popular and enduring works of the first half of the 20th century.
The Symphonic Dances was Rachmaninoff’s last composition. He had been frustrated by the hostile reception given to some of his recent pieces and perhaps sensed more than ever being stylistically old-fashioned. The exception among these later works was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for piano and orchestra, which proved an immediate success and got a further boost when the choreographer Mikhail Fokine created a wildly popular ballet called Paganini, which premiered at London’s Covent Garden in June 1939. At this point Rachmaninoff and his wife were living in a comfortable oceanside estate on Long Island, where Fokine and other celebrated Russians were neighbors. Rachmaninoff had never completed a ballet (unlike most of his great Russian precursors and contemporaries) and wondered whether Fokine might be interested in creating a new piece. (Fokine’s death ended those hopes.)
Another great satisfaction came in late 1939, when The Philadelphia Orchestra presented a “Rachmaninoff Cycle” in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall. The next summer, at age 67, he was inspired to compose for the first time in several years. He informed Eugene Ormandy: “Last week I finished a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called Fantastic Dances. I shall now begin the orchestration. Unfortunately my concert tour begins on October 14. I have a great deal of practice to do and I don’t know whether I shall be able to finish the orchestration before November. I should be very glad if, upon your return, you would drop over to our place. I should like to play the piece for you.”
The Symphonic Dances premiered successfully in Philadelphia, although it was less well received a few days later in New York. With time, the piece established itself as a dazzling and vibrant compositional farewell, one with poignant private echoes and resonances. It is also a reminder that although Rachmaninoff was a towering pianist and wrote five great works for piano and orchestra, he was also a gifted conductor who composed many pieces that do not involve the piano at all, from operas to evocative a cappella choral works, three symphonies, and this final orchestral masterpiece.
Rachmaninoff initially thought of titling the three movements “Daytime,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight,” but ultimately decided against it. The first movement (Non allegro) gets off to a rather subdued start, but quickly becomes more energetic as a rather menacing march. It is notable for its use of solo saxophone, an indication of Rachmaninoff’s interest in jazz. There is a slower middle part and coda, where he quotes the brooding opening theme of his First Symphony. Since in 1940 he—and everyone else—thought the score of that work was lost (it was discovered a few years after his death), the reference is entirely personal. The magical scoring at this point, with strings evocatively accompanied by piccolo, flutes, piano, harp, and glockenspiel, makes what had originally seemed aggressive more than 40 years earlier in the First Symphony now appear calm and serene.
The Andante con moto offers a soloistic, leisurely, melancholy, and mysterious mood in what is marked “tempo of a waltz” with a grander, faster, and more excited ending. The finale begins with a brief slow section (Lento assai) followed by a lively dance with constantly changing meters (Allegro vivace). After a slower middle section, the ending has further personal resonances. It is the last time Rachmaninoff uses the “Dies irae” chant from the Mass of the Dead, which had become something of his signature tune, beginning with his First Symphony and appearing in many other compositions. He also recalls music he had used in his choral All-Night Vigil nearly 30 years earlier, and here marks the score “Alliluya” (to use the Russian spelling). At the very end he wrote the words, “I thank Thee, Lord.”
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Although the public has always loved the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, until fairly recently he was met largely with disdain by critical and academic circles. Viewed as an anachronism and Romantic holdout by progressives of the 1920s and ’30s, he is now embraced as a Romantic master who just happened to have flourished in the 20th century. He was trained during the 1880s and ’90s in a staunchly conservative Russian conservatory system, and he held true to this outlook to his dying day.
As it turns out, this was not vice but virtue—and indeed, Rachmaninoff’s reputation has gained considerably from our renewed interest in tonal music of all sorts. It was once fashionable to criticize his works as “sounding like movie music.” Today, at a time when fascinating concert programs are being formed from film scores of Miklós Rózsa, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Bernard Herrmann, this might just as easily be taken as a compliment.
Although he had composed several big orchestral scores and piano works, it was not until the first decade of the 20th century that Rachmaninoff’s originality began to shine forth. The Second Symphony was one of a series of masterworks that began forming around 1900. The year was 1906, and the composer had come a long way since the 1897 disaster of his First Symphony—the piece that César Cui had colorfully declared would have “delighted the imps of hell.” Since then the young composer’s artistic outlook had broadened, and he took up the Second Symphony in the first decade of the new century with fresh confidence gained through the creation of a brilliant series of pieces such as the Second Piano Concerto, the Cello Sonata, and the Op. 23 piano preludes. He began sketching the new symphony as early as 1902, but apparently made little progress until 1906. “A month or more ago I did indeed finish a symphony,” he wrote to his friend Nikita Morozov in January 1907, “but to this must be added the crucial words ‘in rough.’ I have not announced it to the world because I wanted to finish it completely beforehand.”
Reluctant to repeat the debacle of the First Symphony, whose raw youthful vigor had startled St. Petersburg’s genteel public, Rachmaninoff was determined to polish this work to a high luster before allowing it to leave his work-desk. This was no simple matter. “I can tell you that I am dissatisfied with it but that it will come into existence,” the composer wrote, with determination, “though probably not before autumn.”
The result was indeed a gigantic symphony, one of the longest Russian symphonic works up to that time, and even after Rachmaninoff had completed the short-score version it took him nearly six months to finish the thick and colorfully textured orchestration. Much of this work took place in late 1907 in Dresden, where the composer had taken his family for a respite from the Russian political unrest that would soon bring about his departure from his native land. Completing the symphony at the close of the year, he dedicated the work to his former teacher, Sergei Taneyev.
Alexander Siloti, the conductor who had continually urged the composer toward haste (by circulating rumors that the symphony was already finished), arranged for its premiere on a concert in St. Petersburg on January 26, 1908; the composer conducted. The work’s extraordinary success with a public that had previously regarded him so coolly must have been a source of deep satisfaction. In many respects, in fact, neither of his subsequent symphonies—The Bells of 1913 (a symphony in all but name) or the Symphony No. 3 of 1936—was to show the mastery of structure and idiom of the Second. Rachmaninoff conducted the Second Symphony with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1909 during his first trip to America in a program that also included Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and in which he played three of his solo piano preludes.
“A composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion,” Rachmaninoff once said to critic David Ewen; all three are found in ample measure here. There is much of Russia in the Second Symphony, particularly the Russia of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Prokofiev; the florid melodic style is deeply romantic in its inspiration, and the composer’s religious nature is heard in such aspects as the pervasive presence of the “Dies irae” melody—the Day of Wrath tune from the Requiem Mass—that had already played a role in the First Symphony.
Until recently the Second was usually performed in heavily cut versions, which Rachmaninoff himself had authorized while in America. In the last decades conductors have begun playing the piece without cuts and have found that only in the complete version can one make sense of the composer’s intricate pacing and logic.
The four-movement work begins with an introductory Largo that contains clear reminiscences of the composer’s earliest “Youth” Symphony of 1891; the main theme of the subsequent Allegro moderato, derived from the “motto” of the introduction, and first heard in the violins, is a tune of subtlety and grandeur. The second movement (Allegro molto) is a dashing and brilliant scherzo, with a lyrical second theme and a vivid and dazzling central trio section.
The lugubrious Adagio, one of Rachmaninoff’s most celebrated slow movements, evokes youthful love at its most impassioned; the lush main theme in the first violins gives way to two other equally expressive and long-breathed tunes. Among the crucial events here is the reiteration of the first-movement “motto” immediately following the fortissimo climax. The finale (Allegro vivace) is a spirited gathering-in of themes that concludes the work in a sunny blaze of E major.
—Paul J. Horsley
Program notes © 2023. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.