#violaconcerto

William Walton’s excellent, haunting Viola Concerto. 

Program Notes

Born a decade apart on either side of the turn of the twentieth century, Sergei Prokofiev and William Walton came of age at a pivotal and provocative moment in Western classical music. Just as the two composers were beginning their formal educations on opposite ends of Europe, a proliferation of new musical styles was erupting across the continent. The previously pervasive late Romanticism of figures like Mahler and Strauss and the Impressionism of Ravel and Debussy were giving way to a diverse collection of musical techniques. These new compositional categories included, among others, the free atonality of Schoenberg and Berg, the post-Romanticism of Puccini and Rachmaninoff, the new nationalisms of Bartok, Chavez, Elgar, et al, the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith, the early American experimentalism of Ives, and the jazz-influenced styles of Gershwin and Weill.

As tonight’s program will demonstrate, however, the categories outlined above are anything but separable. Both Prokofiev and Walton simultaneously drew from any number of artistic approaches, constantly experimenting and shifting positions within the constellation of compositional styles as their careers progressed. Indeed, in addition to the soundscapes showcased tonight, these two composers produced an eclectic array of music representative of the politically, economically, and artistically tumultuous time in which they lived. Walton wrote a First Symphony highly reminiscent of Sibelius as well as a string quartet heavily influenced by Schoenberg’s atonal techniques; Prokofiev experienced an extensive neoclassical phase while also composing a collection of works inspired by American jazz and ragtime. Both men wrote everything from film music to opera, and both contributed specifically nationalist as well as compositionally cosmopolitan repertoire.

Framed and undeniably influenced by the two World Wars, the works being performed tonight contain a large sampling of the elements mentioned above. There are periods of extreme gravity—depicting man’s “mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit,” as Prokofiev described theme of his new symphony—interspersed with moments of lighthearted humor and biting satire. Starting off with two works written by a young Walton in the interwar period, we will move on to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, composed just before the conclusion of the Second World War.

William Walton: Portsmouth Point Overture (1925) and Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1929) 

Although English composer William Walton was born in 1902 to a family of musicians and given piano and violin lessons at an early age, he was never really able to master a musical instrument. Walton did gain a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, as a chorister, though, and continued there as an undergraduate at the relatively young age of 16. He was known to spend countless hours in the library studying scores by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Debussy, and other composers from the continent, neglecting all of his other studies. While the young man’s talents were recognized by his teachers at Christ Church, Walton’s first real break came when he became acquainted with the poet Sacheverell Sitwell, a member of the artistically well-connected English family. The Sitwell siblings took Walton under their wing in London, providing for him financially and introducing him to prominent cultural figures around Europe. By the early 1920s he had gained a positive reputation, despite receiving highly ambivalent reviews for his first major work, Façade, which was an unconventional instrumental setting for an extensive series of poems by Edith Sitwell.

Walton began work on the Portsmouth Point Overture in 1925, right around the time he met George Gershwin and landed a job arranging foxtrots for Debroy Somers’ band at the Savoy Hotel—influences highly evident in the overture’s overall sound. The composer modeled the piece after the eponymous etching by nineteenth century artist and caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. The piece of artwork, and presumably Walton’s overture, depicts the harbor of Portsmouth Point on the southern coast of England, an area historically populated by sailors on leave looking for pubs, brothels, and other forms of mischief. In Rowlandson’s rendering, there are crowds of sailors flirting with scantily dressed women, dogs running around begging for food, a street fiddler begging for coins, underwear left hanging to dry on a flagpole, and faces peeping out of windows smoking cigars and aiming rifles—imagery not difficult to summon when listening to Walton’s musical depiction of the scene.

The piece was highly successful, winning a place at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Zürich in 1926 and enjoying frequent performances thereafter. Walton’s musical influences at the time are quite evident in the work’s construction, including elements of Stravinsky and Copland and even Charles Ives in its overlapping thematic material and constantly shifting flow of tempo and rhythm. Although Walton remained ambivalent about being compared to Elgar (he once remarked, “who wants to write music that sounds even remotely like Elgar?”), the impact of his more famous British contemporary is quite obvious in Portsmouth Point. Alongside its brash American feel and sea-shanty-esque melodic material, the piece’s brass and cymbal crashes recall a number of moments from Elgar’s famous Pomp and Circumstances marches.

It was two years after the premiere of the Portsmouth Point Overture that London-based conductor Thomas Beecham suggested that Walton write a concerto for the soloist Lionel Tertis, an internationally admired British musician and a staunch advocate for the instrument he called “the Cinderella of the string family.” After the successes of Façade and Portsmouth Point, Walton was becoming more confident in his own personal compositional style, and agreed to take on the assignment of writing his first major concerto. With a childhood history of mediocrity at stringed instruments, however, Walton cautioned before beginning the piece that all he knew of the viola was that it “made a rather awful sound.” Gradually gaining more confidence in the viola’s potential as he composed the piece, Walton commented to his friend Siegfried Sassoon in 1928, “I finished yesterday the second movement of my Viola Concerto. At the moment I think it will be my best work, better than the Sinfonia, if only the third and last movement works out well.” Finally finishing in 1929, Walton sent the concerto manuscript with an enthusiastic premiere request to Tertis, who shockingly sent the manuscript back to the young composer soon after receiving it, refusing to be involved in its performance. As Tertis later reflected in his autobiography, “I had not learnt to appreciate Walton’s style. The innovations in his musical language, which now seem so logical and so truly in the mainstream of music, then struck me as far-fetched.”

Walton had become friends with composer and violist Paul Hindemith in 1923 and admired his work, and so he decided to extend a second invitation to have the concerto performed. Hindemith accepted, even though the rehearsal process was apparently not to the German composer’s liking. As he reported in a letter, “so far Walton has only had one rehearsal in which he managed to play the first movement just once. The orchestra is bad, consisting mainly of women and English ones at that.” Nevertheless, the concerto was performed and enthusiastically received by critics in 1929, and gained Walton widespread acclaim. Not all audience members were delighted with Walton’s new approach, however. Elgar attended a performance of the concerto a couple years afterward—the only time the two composers actually met—and was reported to have “paced up and down behind the orchestral gallery during the performance of the concerto, deploring that such music should be thought fit for a stringed instrument.”

Regardless of Elgar’s opinion, Walton’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra remains a favorite in the viola repertoire for good reason, containing strikingly beautiful and melancholic melodic lines as well as virtuosic technical displays that highlight the viola’s unique timbral possibilities. Prokofiev’s presence is a strong one: like the Russian composer’s first violin concerto, Walton’s concerto contains a lyrical opening melody and a shortened recapitulation in the first movement, a section introduced by double stops from the soloist and followed by flowing melodic material in the woodwinds and triplets in the solo part. In the final movement, Prokofiev is summoned again in the return to the concerto’s opening theme layered with the finale’s theme serving as accompaniment. Hindemith’s own work for viola, Kammermusik No. 5, was another direct inspiration for the young Walton, who had not expected the famous composer to be the concerto’s performer when he was writing it: “I’m surprised he played it,” Walton commented, “one or two bars are almost identical.” The viola concerto is significantly more original than it is imitative, however, with each of the three movements demonstrating both masterful compositional planning and emotional depth on the part of its young composer.

Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5, Op. 100 (1944)

Sergei Prokofiev was born in an isolated rural area in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire in 1891. His mother had grown up with some musical training, and helped the boy write songs from a very young age. It was clear early on in Prokofiev’s childhood that he had exceptional musical abilities, and he notoriously developed a sense of self-assurance and immunity to criticism to accompany his talents. The young composer wrote his first piano piece at age five, became highly proficient at chess at age 7, completed his first opera at age 9, attempted his first symphony at age 11, and entered university at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 13, where he was frequently known to complain about how boring the coursework was.

Prokofiev’s childhood reputation both as an exceptionally talented musician and self-confident rebel followed him to St. Petersburg, where he pursued a career both as a composer and performer, also avidly reading scores and absorbing techniques from composers across Europe. He graduated from his class in composition in 1909 and entered the conservatory to study piano with Anna Yesipova and conducting with Nikolai Tcherepnin. Prokofiev continued to compose throughout, receiving mixed reviews for daring works like Sarcasms (1917) and his first two piano concertos, which experimented liberally with chromaticism and polytonality. While some audience members reacted critically—“to hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!”—advocates of his brand musical modernism hailed the composer as a genius.

At the start of World War I, Prokofiev decided to return to the conservatory in order to escape conscription, writing—among much else—a number of works in the neoclassical idiom, including his first symphony, The Classical, and his first violin concerto (which, we remember, would have a significant impact on William Walton a few years later). Prokofiev continued to run from war to pursue his music: after experiencing the Bolshevik Revolution and fearing a takeover of St. Petersburg, the composer fled to San Francisco in 1918 and soon became well established in the United States as well. Prokofiev and his family did not settle in any one place for long, though, moving to Paris for a few years and making the trip back to the Soviet Union in 1936. He was evacuated from Moscow in 1941 after the German invasion of Russia, forced to retreat further and further east as the war progressed, composing all the while, and finally returning to Moscow during the winter of 1944.

It was at this point, sixteen years after his last symphonic project, that Prokofiev sat down to write his Symphony No. 5. The work’s combined derisive, tragic, and ultimately triumphant tone was unquestionably influenced by its historical moment. Its four movements do not conform to the usual symphonic progression, but are ordered slow—fast—slow—fast, reminiscent of the Baroque convention. The first movement’s soaring melodies contrast dramatically with the second movement’s sharply satirical tone, featuring mischievous melodies passed from the clarinet to the strings, turning sinister and all the more energetic by its conclusion. The third movement’s initial dynamic and melodic restraint adds depth and intensity to its main theme, which at times feels like a funeral march. The finale surprisingly gives way to the initial movement’s theme, a memory which, after a quiet interlude, is finally transformed to a triumphant, dizzying, and increasingly robust final declaration.

Prokofiev conducted the symphony’s premiere in January 1945 to a packed audience full of prominent political and cultural figures, at a time of heightened national anticipation as the Soviet Union waited to hear that Nazi Germany had finally been defeated. Pianist and onlooker Sviatoslav Richter described the feel of the performance: “The Great Hall was illuminated, no doubt, as it always was, but when Prokofiev stood up, the light seemed to pour straight down on him from somewhere up above. He stood like a monument on a pedestal. And then, when Prokofiev had taken his place on the podium and silence reigned in the hall, artillery salvos suddenly thundered forth. His baton was raised. He waited, and began only after the cannons had stopped. There was something very significant in this—something symbolic.”