Program Notes:
Bravo Beethoven!

Featuring The Boston Trio — Irina Muresanu, violin; Allison Eldredge, ’cello; Heng-Jin Park, piano
Steven Lipsitt, Music Director, conducting

Friday, November 17, 2006 at 8pm
Sunday, November 19, 2006 at 3pm

"Zapfenstreich" ("Thunderbolt") March
Though best-known today as the revolutionary creator of groundbreaking symphonies, concertos, string quartets, sonatas, one extraordinary opera (Fidelio), and the Missa Solemnis and a few other choral works, Beethoven, like most 18th-century composers before him, also wrote occasional pieces for parties, celebrations, and other specific events and sponsors. In 1809 he was commissioned to compose this military march for the Bohemian Army Band, to be used as the evening tattoo, the signal which would call the soldiers back to their barracks.

Triple Concerto
With the death of Mozart in 1791, German-Austrian musical life was left without a genius composer who was also a dominant solo performer. (Haydn --- who was only a serviceable keyboard soloist anyway --- had been somewhat secluded in Esterhazy, with two extended tours to London, and thus not central to concert life in Vienna and Bonn.) The musical public began to look to the young Beethoven, who was starting to make a name for himself as an imaginative and compelling virtuoso pianist, and a brilliantly gifted improviser. He wrote his piano concertos largely as vehicles for himself as performer, offering opportunities for this "freelance" musician to reach his public.

The Concerto for Violin, 'Cello, and Piano, on the other hand, was written for Archduke Rudolph --- Beethoven's aristocratic piano student --- to play with two of his expert "house musicians," Carl August Seidler and Anton Kraft. While the scoring of a work for piano trio (a common chamber music configuration) set off against full orchestra was unusual, stylistically the piece continues the 18th-century tradition of the sinfonia concertante, a symphony with multiple soloists. The form had been most popular in Paris, London, and Mannheim, but was also taken up in Vienna, Bonn, and other musical capitals in Europe --- over 500 sinfonie concertanti written between 1760 and 1830 have survived.

The "Triple" Concerto is structured in the traditional three movements. The large-scale first movement (Allegro), in a modified sonata form, entrusts most of the thematic development to the solo trio, and tends toward the cheerful and conversational rather than the dramatic and stormy. The slow movement (Largo) is full of poetry, with a lovely singing 'cello line and contrasting rhythmic figures in the piano. The finale (Rondo alla Polacca), following without a break, is full of elegance and charm, combining 3/4 and 2/4 meters.

Fourth Symphony
When Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna in 1792, his friends presented him with an album of good wishes, in which his sometime patron Count Waldstein wrote: "With the help of assiduous labor, you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands." The Count may not have reckoned on the possible inhibiting effect on a young composer --- even one as demonstrably gifted as Beethoven --- of the legacy of Mozart's brilliant late symphonies, and of Haydn's continuing symphonic and string quartet works. In any event, it would be eight years before Beethoven went public with his first symphony and his first set of string quartets.

Although the Fourth Symphony in B-flat is the first of Beethoven's symphonies to survive in autograph, little is known of its genesis. Known for his copious sketchbooks and his habit of worrying themes and motives laboriously before settling on their eventual symphonic expression, Beethoven left very few sketches of the Fourth. Are they lost? or was he uncharacteristically direct and effortless in the creation of this work?

The first movement takes a page from Haydn, beginning with an extended and mysterious slow introduction in the minor that evolves into the sunny major tonality of the Allegro vivace. The second movement shows more the influence of Mozart, with dramatic contrasts, some gorgeous wind writing, and a structure resembling a sonata-form without development. The third movement displays Beethoven's first expansion of the three-part minuet form into the five-part scherzo: instead of ABA (where A is the minuet section and B the lighter trio section), the movement unfolds as ABABA. The finale is a kind of perpetuum mobile, brilliant, witty, and virtuosic. Although the Fourth Symphony avoids the length, density, and extra musical associations ("heroic imagery" in the Third, the "call of fate" in the Fifth) of its neighbors in Beethoven's catalogue, it is unmistakably the powerful work of a bold genius with a gift for the symphonic expression of musical ideas.



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