The first NSO Showcase of the 2024-2025 season falls on a consequential day in our country’s calendar: the day after Election. As I write this just before that fateful event, I appreciate the words of the American conductor and educator David Robertson who will conduct the first piece on our program: “the grand story of America is that it is being created constantly, connected to its past, but forging forward into a future unknown. Performing, exploring the American musical landscape can lead to unexpected inspiration, questioning contemplation, and the awareness that self-evident truths are anything but that.” (David Robertson: The Expanding Horizon: American Music at 250)
The music on this program comes to us from National Symphony Orchestra performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (with an excursion to the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory for a historic recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony).
It is appropriate that we open this post-election-day NSO Showcase with an American classic: Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Based on a text by James Agee, it is a meditation on—among other things—family. The writer remembers his six-year-old self, sharing an idyllic summer evening with his parents and relatives in 1915. The intimations of tragedy hover over this tranquil scene...a fast automobile whizzes by in the street followed by a slower one, and against the locusts humming in the trees and the rockers on the porch, Agee remembers his father’s love. The same father who was tragically killed in a car crash the following year. In 1947, Samuel Barber, who was the same age as Agee, and whose own father lay dying, set the writer’s words to music, investing them with his own heartfelt nostalgia and love of family—as he told them: “It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester and you are all in it.”
The shadow of a world war hangs over both the literary and musical versions. Each is a moment of happiness encapsulated forever despite a “future unknown” as Maestro Robertson says, and it is a moment, a memory we can all in some measure relate to: the comfort of childhood and the love of family in an idealized American environment. The sense of belonging—even for a short, magical time.
Soprano Masanabe Cecilia Rangwanasha brings to life the magic of that nostalgic childhood. She sang the role of Liù in Washington National Opera’s Turandot last season, making her American operatic debut. The Washington Post praised her “precisely sculpted control and golden color” and exhorted fans to “see this show just to hear Rangwanasha in action.”
While we’re on the subject of nostalgia, of coming home, the November NSO Showcase program features another historic homecoming, Mstislav Rostropovich’s Return to Russia in 1990 after 16 years in exile. The event was memorialized in Sony Classical’s 1991 recording from which we’ll hear Tchaikovsky’s last symphony, the Pathétique. Writing in the CD booklet, music critic Octavio Roca told us that this symphony was the score Rostropovich last conducted in Russia before his exile, and the one he chose for his first night back home. “Rostropovich's interpretation of the Pathétique,” he continued, “has always been controversial and intensely personal.”
The NSO’s current music director, Gianandrea Noseda, recently told us a remarkable story about his own interpretation of the Pathétique, specifically the 3rd movement. Here is a snippet of our conversation, slightly edited.
The 3rd movement is this scherzo, celebratory, over the moon, a little bombastic. I don’t see it as a celebration of joy. I see the third movement as an invasion of insects, of mice coming from far, so that celebration is the celebration of the end of everything because when the mice are coming, the rest is just nothing—they leave behind them zero. Because they are going to eat everything. And that is not my idea, but is an idea that I got from a Russian conductor, Vladimir Delman who spent a lot of time in the Gulag and he survived, and after that he escaped the Soviet Union and came to Italy I had a conversation with him about this moment of the Tchaikovsky Pathétique and he told me “ah, that is not celebratory, that is just an invasion of rats.” And it completely changed my impression of the symphony—of that movement. And the finale is so moving, so poignant, and I think when comes the tam tam before the end that shows the end of the real life, it is like a point that defined the before and after, so I think all the symphony goes to that moment, this tam tam moment and what follows is this chorale played by the brass and after that followed by the low strings instruments that goes to nothing, so basically it’s a symphony that starts from nothing with the solo bassoon and finishes with nothing and in between there are all the possible human emotions.
Human emotions were certainly on display that night in Moscow as the NSO performed Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. Slava’s return to Moscow after 16 years in exile was truly phenomenal—he was greeted by crowds wherever he went. One of the NSO stagehands who was on this historic tour recalled how people spent the night UNDER the piano in the Great Hall so they could reach out and touch Slava as he walked by.
Cities are in the spotlight in this month’s NSO Showcase...Knoxville, Moscow, and Vienna. Vienna, city of dreams...home of the waltz, decadent pastries, psychoanalysis...and glorious music from Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, Brahms and on November’s NSO Showcase, Mozart. Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck leads the orchestra in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.24 in C minor with soloist Nikolai Lugansky.
Piano concertos were Mozart's bread and butter in Vienna, and between 1782 and 1786 he wrote 15 of them. The Concerto No.24 dates from 1786 and was finished just before his opera The Marriage of Figaro. There are several unique aspects to No.24: it's one of Mozart’s only 2 minor-key piano concertos, it has the largest orchestra of all the concertos, and it uses both oboes and clarinets, so the wind section is very prominent. As a result, the piece has a distinctive sound, with the wind band section functioning like a counterpart to the solo piano. You could think of them as characters in an opera. There were lots of virtuoso wind players in Vienna at the time, in the military bands and the popular "harmonie" or wind bands, so Mozart made use of them. The concerto wasn't published in Mozart's lifetime, so the manuscript is kind of messy, and the solo part wasn't fully written out, because Mozart liked to improvise freely from a few suggestions he sketched out in the score.
This month we celebrate the genius of James Agee, Samuel Barber, Tchaikovsky and Mozart. No matter the outcome of this week’s events, there remains another iconic American holiday marking the month of November—Thanksgiving. It is a time to gather with family and friends in gratitude for the many gifts we receive--a time for all of us to come together to celebrate the life we share--a time to be thankful for the harmony great music can bring into our lives.
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