TMSO Special Concert in Fukuoka │ Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra

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Artists

Eliahu INBAL, Conductor
Gavriel LIPKIND, Violoncello *

Eliahu INBAL (Conductor Laureate)

Eliahu Inbal was born in Jerusalem in 1936. He held numerous chief posts with orchestras such as Frankfurt Radio Symphony (hr-Sinfonieorchester), Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Teatro la Fenice di Venezia, and Czech Philharmonic. He was appointed Conductor Laureate of Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Many CDs of live performances by Inbal and TMSO are winning great acclaim. He was decorated by French and German Government, and by the cities of Frankfurt and Wien. In August 2019, Inbal served as Principal Conductor of Taipei Symphony Orchestra.

Gavriel LIPKIND (Violoncello)

Program

Brahms: Tragische Ouvertüre, op.81

Program Notes
Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme, op.33 *

Program Notes
Shostakovich: Symphony No.5 in D minor, op.47

Program Notes

Introduction: Moderato quasi andante
Theme: Moderato semplice
Variation Ⅰ: Tempo della Thema
Variation Ⅱ: Tempo della Thema
Variation Ⅲ: Andante sostenuto
Variation Ⅳ: Andante grazioso
Variation Ⅴ: Allegro moderato
Variation Ⅵ: Andante
Variation Ⅶ: Allegro vivo
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, l840; Died in St. Petersburg, November 6, l893

The Rococo Variations grew out of the admiration Tchaikovsky held generally for music of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, and in particular for that of his favorite composer, Mozart. The term “rococo” refers to a style common in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a style characterized by delicacy, grace, charm and elegance; hence, a certain spirit of artificiality and lighthearted sentimentality is expressed. Anything particularly dramatic or impassioned would have been in bad taste. Tchaikovsky’s homage to a bygone era was written in December of l876, more than a century removed from the period it nostalgically evokes. The premiere was given a year later in Moscow, on December 30, 1877 at a Russian Musical Society Symphony Concerto with Wilhelm Fitzenhagen as soloist and Nikolai Rubinstein conducting. Fitzenhagen made numerous and significant changes to Tchaikovsky’s autograph after it had reached the publisher (Jürgenson). These included touching up the solo part and rearranging the order of the variations. When Jürgenson questioned the composer about the legitimacy of Fitzenhagen’s work, Tchaikovsky acquiesced, and this is how the composition was published, both in piano reduction (1878) and full score (1889).

The theme is presented by the soloist after a short orchestral introduction. Though presumably Tchaikovsky’s own, it does indeed breathe a Mozartian air, and is followed by seven variations. The first two are lively, at times even virtuosic, for the soloist. A brief passage for woodwinds announces the end of each variation. With the third variation, the mood and tempo change. The writing is more chromatic, the spirit more yearning, the mood more romantic than rococo. At the end, the cello climbs to its uppermost range. The fourth variation is marked by passages of great technical flair for the soloist, often unaccompanied by any orchestral support. A flute presents the theme for the fifth variation, with an accompaniment of trills in the cello. A wide-ranging cadenza for the cello leads into the D-minor sixth variation, where we leave the rococo world to experience the “real” Tchaikovsky in a mournful, deeply emotional passage. The final variation returns to a world of animated gaiety, and is perhaps even a touch too exuberant for the rococo spirit.
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

Ⅰ Moderato
Ⅱ Allegretto
Ⅲ Largo
Ⅳ Allegro non troppo
Dmitri Shostakovich: Born in St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906; died in Moscow, August 9, 1975

Many of the works we today hail as masterpieces suffered difficult birth pangs. But Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony sprang into the world fully accepted. In this case, there is a double irony, for the composer managed to please two entirely different, in fact, diametrically opposed, ideological fronts simultaneously, right from the symphony’s premiere on November 21, 1937 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg again): 1) Soviet officialdom, which was demanding from Shostakovich music free of “formalistic perversion,” that is, music easily intelligible to the Soviet masses; 2) those who believed in the mandate for a creative artist to produce only according to the dictates of his esthetic impulses and personal convictions.

Shostakovich subtitled his symphony “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism” as a palliative to the heavy-handed government critics who had mercilessly railed at his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and other works. Further for the benefit of Soviet officialdom, Shostakovich claimed that the symphony had as its theme “the making of a man. … The finale is the optimistic solution of the tragically tense moments of the first movement.”

Government officials swallowed the hypocrisy. The composer’s true feelings were revealed to the public, at least in the West, only years later: “I never thought about any exultant finales, for what exultation could there be? The rejoicing is forced, created under threat.” Occupying a middle ground between the forces of the exhilarated and the bitter we might simply take the traditional romantic view of a big symphony as a generalized portrayal of conflict and struggle leading to triumph, as seen in such works as the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler.

Needless to say, one is free to accept or reject any or all of these interpretations, and to listen to the symphony only as an abstract configuration of purely musical components.

The work abounds in extended but easily recognizable and memorable themes that lend themselves to fragmentation and development. There are passages of haunting beauty (the closing pages of the first movement especially, described by one writer as “strange spatial loneliness”); pressing intensity (the inexorable build-up to the climax of the third movement); mordant wit (the cumbersome, grotesquely ponderous effect of the opening of the second movement, set off by squealy high woodwinds a moment later); strident militarism (the sardonic march in the first movement or the principal theme of the finale); and an almost unlimited number of imaginative and inventive orchestral effects: fanfares, extremes of range (the finale’s coda begins with horns in unison playing the lowest note but one in the entire repertory for that instrument), prominent use of piano and celesta, wide leaps with mischievous effects, unexpected contrasts of high/low and loud/soft, and chamber-music delicacy contrasted with massive tuttis.

Regardless then of the ideological, philosophical, or musical preconceptions and attitudes one brings to bear on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the music has shown itself capable of both absorbing and transcending them all, and in so doing, has secured for itself a secure niche in the pantheon of the world’s greatest and most popular symphonies.
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

TMSO Special Concert in Fukuoka

Artists

Eliahu INBAL (Conductor Laureate)

Gavriel LIPKIND (Violoncello)

Program

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