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Stravinsky: Jeu de cartes |
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Steven Smith is currently in his fifth season as Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, his fourth season as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, and his third year as Music Director of the Santa Fe Symphony and Chorus. His responsibilities with The Cleveland Orchestra include helping to plan and conduct educational and family concerts, assisting Music Director Christoph von Dohnányi in concert preparation, acting as a cover conductor and helping to oversee the production of broadcasts for the Cleveland Orchestra Radio Network. In addition, he appears as conductor for subscription series concerts, at the Blossom Festival, and for Christmas programs. Mr. Smith's recent guest-conducting appearances include debuts with the symphony orchestras of Detroit, Houston, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and engagements with the orchestras of Akron, Kalamazoo, Kansas City, Memphis and Santa Fe. He has led Chicago's Grant Park Symphony, Cleveland's Ohio Chamber Orchestra, New York's Chautauqua Symphony, the Annapolis Symphony and the Colorado Symphony in Denver. Mr. Smith's recent debuts include appearances with the Hartford and Long Beach symphony orchestras, Summermusic at Harkness Festival in Connecticut, the Long Island Philharmonic and Mexico's Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa. During the 2000-01 season, he conducted the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra in special appearances by invitation at Carnegie Hall and Penn State University. From 1996 to 1998, Steven Smith was associate conductor of the Kansas City Symphony. Concurrent with this appointment, he was the sole recipient of the Conductor Career Development Grant and was named Foundation Artist by the Geraldine C. and Emory M. Ford Foundation. Previous positions include music director of the San Juan Symphony, assistant conductor of the Colorado Springs Symphony and conductor of Epicycle: An Ensemble for New Music. Mr. Smith is also active as a composer. In 1991, The Cleveland Orchestra commissioned and gave the world premiere of Shake, Rattle & Roar, an interactive piece for orchestra and audience. The work was featured on National Public Radio and has since been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony and Columbus Symphony, among other orchestras. Additional compositions include La Chasse (performed by The Cleveland Orchestra in July 2001), A Journey and Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra. A native of Toledo, Ohio, Steven Smith earned master's degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is the recipient of the Cleveland Institute of Music Alumni Association 1999 Alumni Achievement Award. |
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Piano During the 2001-02 season, Mr. Ohlsson will be presented in recital by Carnegie Hall on its Keyboard Virtuosos series (February 25, 2002) and will be heard with the London Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall, in addition to appearances with the Boston Symphony and many other American orchestras. His recital engagements include performances in Baltimore, Calgary, Fresno, Kalamazoo (Gilmore Festival), Miami and San Francisco. Abroad, he appears with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Singapore Symphony, the Taiwan National Orchestra, and in recital in Tokyo. Mr. Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician and has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács and Tokyo string quartets, among other ensembles. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio. A prolific recording artist, Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on a variety of major labels and has recorded the complete solo works of Chopin for Arabesque. Garrick Ohlsson was born in White Plains, New York, where he began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at 13 he entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. In high school, he demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and languages, but the concert stage remained his true career objective. His musical development was influenced by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barbarini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne and Irma Wolpe. Although he won first prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montreal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal, which brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since that time, he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where to this day he remains virtually a national hero. Mr. Ohlsson made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in March 1975 at Severance Hall. Among numerous other appearances with the Orchestra, in 1988 he performed the Busoni Piano Concerto under Christoph von Dohnányi's direction at both Severance Hall and Carnegie Hall, and recorded the work for Telarc. The recording was nominated for a Grammy Award as "best classical album of the year" in 1990. Mr. Ohlsson's most recent engagement with the Orchestra was in the opening concert of the 1999 Blossom Festival season. He opened the 2001-02 Reinberger Recital Series with an all-Chopin recital in Severance Hall's Reinberger Chamber Hall on November 4, 2001. |
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Jeu
de cartes Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, on June
17, 1882, and died in New York on April 6, 1971. He wrote Jeu de cartes,
a "ballet in three deals," in 1936, and conducted its premiere
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on April 27, 1937. This work runs about 20 minutes in performance. Stravinsky's score
calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes (second doubling English horn), 2 clarinets,
2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum,
and strings. The Cleveland Orchestra's only previous performances of Jeu de
cartes were led by the composer at Severance Hall in March 1964. At
that time, the Orchestra recorded Jeu de cartes under Stravinsky's direction. Igor Stravinsky, who had established his world reputation with three
Russian-inspired ballets (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of
Spring), remained partial to danced theater for the rest of his life.
In his post-Sacre ballet scores, he in general strove for lighter
themes and more grace than high drama onstage. In Apollon Musagète,
he created a model of calm and clarity. Le baiser de la fée
("The Fairy's Kiss") is a romantic tribute to Tchaikovsky. And
in Jeu de cartes ("Card Game," sometimes known as "The
Card Party") the cards in a deck come alive and act out their struggle
during a game of poker. The idea for a poker ballet came from Stravinsky himself, an avid poker player. He suggested it to Lincoln Kirstein, the director of the American Ballet, when the company commissioned a new work from him. He worked out the scenario with Nikita Malayev, a friend of his older son's. The action of the ballet was set forth in the preface to the printed score:
The timeless wisdom of Jean de La Fontaine, the great 17th-century author
of fables, is here quoted with some irony (its truth has since been proven
in much more tragic circumstances). The whole ballet is also a kind of
fable, where La Fontaine's animals are replaced by cards in a deck, equally
playful allegories of human weaknesses. The dancers' costumes represent
playing cards of all four suits, and their interactions are carefully
worked out in the scenario (and reproduced in detail in the Eulenburg
miniature score). The work begins with a brass fanfare which has its own story. Stravinsky
recalled that as a child he spent several holidays at German spas where
he visited the casinos. The voice of the master of ceremonies, calling
out at the beginning of each "deal": Ein neues Spiel, ein
neues Glück ("a new game, a new chance"), still rang
in his ears when he composed this music. This introduction is followed
by a pas d'action in which the game begins. In its middle is the
agitated "Dance of the Joker," a passage full of mock-dramatic
outbursts in a pathos-filled minor key. This is followed by the graceful
waltz of the cards who don't let the joker disturb their game. In the second "deal" we hear (after the opening fanfare) a
"March of Hearts and Spades" and then a set of variations in
which each of the four Queens comes forward for a solo. These variations
contain subtle allusions to such well-known classic works as Beethoven's
Eighth Symphony (the second movement) and Johann Strauss Jr.'s Fledermaus.
Stravinsky evokes some of his own music as well, most notably his Capriccio
for piano and orchestra and his opera Mavra. The second "deal"
concludes with a pas de quatre and another march. The return of the fanfare having announced the third "deal,"
the ballet continues with a waltz that plays with motifs from Ravel's
La Valse, followed by a "Presto" (the battle of Hearts
and Spades) that sounds a lot like the overture to Rossini's Barber
of Seville. Even the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth shows up for
a moment as an irreverent but deliciously funny caricature. In the concluding
measures, the opening fanfare is transformed into something resembling
the final scene of Petrushka - but the same motif that sounded
so menacing in the earlier work is now little more than the cards of the
deck taking their last bows. All these tongue-in-cheek allusions to earlier
music suggest that the card game is also a game of role-playing in which
the cards assume various identities during the show. George Balanchine,
who created the choreography for the world premiere, felt the presence
of "the Italian spirit of the commedia dell'arte" in the piece,
and that is entirely consistent with poking fun at some of our most revered
musical classics. When Jeu de cartes was premiered at the Met in April 1937, it shared a triple bill with Apollon Musagète and Le baiser de la fée. Stravinsky's second ballet trilogy - a neo-Classical one this time - was thus complete.
—Peter Laki |
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Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor,
Op. 16 Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, of Russian
parents, on April 23, 1891. He died in Moscow on March 5, 1953. He composed his Second Piano Concerto in 1913, and played the solo
part in the first performance on September 5 of that year at Pavlovsk,
near St. Petersburg. There was a major scandal at the performance, with
hisses and catcalls; critics expressed their complete bewilderment at
what they perceived as "cacophony," "craziness" and
"musical mess." The score of the Second Piano Concerto was lost or destroyed during
the civil war of 1918, and in 1923, the composer (by then living in the
West) reconstructed it from memory during a stay in Ettal, Bavaria. The
first performance of the reconstructed concerto took place in Paris in
1924, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. Koussevitzky also led the United
States premiere, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and with Prokofiev
as soloist. The 1923 scoring runs about 30 minutes in performance and calls for
solo piano, plus an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum,
side drum, cymbals), and strings. The score was published with a dedication
in memory of Max A. Schmidhof, one of Prokofiev's friends, who had committed
suicide in 1913. The Cleveland Orchestra first performed this concerto in 1962, with soloist Malcolm Frager under George Szell's direction. The most recent performances were given in November 1990, with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting and Horacio Gutiérrez playing the solo part.
According to Prokofiev biographer Israel Nestyev, the composer had "long
[been] an admirer of Mayakovsky's poetic innovations;" he actually
met the poet, who was two years his junior, at the Poets' Café
in Moscow. Mayakovsky sketched a portrait of the composer at the piano
and wrote, "Sergei Sergeievich is playing on the most sensitive nerves
of Vladimir Vladimirovich..." Mayakovsky also gave Prokofiev a copy
of his poem War and the World with the inscription: "To the
World President of Music from the World President of Poetry." Unlike
Mayakovsky, however, who had early espoused the ideals of Bolshevism and
become an ardent revolutionary, Prokofiev had no interest in politics.
Still, as Nestyev has pointed out, "the young Prokofiev's épatage
[desire to baffle] was...closely related to the 'ultra-leftist' revolt
that was developing in Russian poetry and painting." The young Prokofiev was, by inclination, an iconoclast, not unlike the
futurist poets and painters. He, too, had little sympathy for the achievements
of his predecessors. He rebelled against the academicism of his teachers
at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Glazunov and Liadov in particular),
the Romanticism of Rachmaninoff, and the mysticism of Scriabin all at
the same time. He had a natural penchant for humor and satire, manifest
since childhood, and soon perfected a musical technique to express it.
This technique often involves the replacement of certain pitches in harmonies
by others, often only a half-step away, giving the impression of being
"out of tune" when it is really, of course, the harmony he intended.
This was his way of creating new musical "words." To increase
the effect of this harmonic procedure, Prokofiev contrasted it with a
marked traditionalism in other aspects of his style: his rhythms, for
instance, often stay within the Classical framework of symmetrical, two-bar-plus-two-bar
phrases, and the basic building blocks of his melodies are all inherited
from Romantic music. This combination of old and new elements produces
the piquancy - and the unmistakably new spirit - that makes Prokofiev's
early style so special. The beginning of the Second Piano Concerto is a perfect example of that
style. Its beautiful, eight-bar melody, played by the solo piano to an
accompaniment of almost Chopinesque figurations in the left hand, is "spiced"
with many seemingly incongruous notes. The instructions given to the performer
(narrante ["narrating"], caloroso, con gran espressione
["with warmth and great expression"], and so on) reinforce this
Romantic attitude, which coexists with completely un-Romantic sonorities.
The second section adopts a faster tempo and a skipping, staccato melody
(marked con eleganza). After a virtuosic development of this theme,
the initial melody returns, growing into an extended cadenza that is turbulent,
highly dramatic, and fiendishly difficult to play (at the triple-fortissimo
culmination point, the performance instruction is colossale). A
return of the first theme closes the movement, which dies away pianissimo. Throughout the second-movement scherzo, the piano plays unbroken sixteenth-notes
in octave unison, while the melody belongs to the orchestra. It is a movement
of perpetual motion with a virtually uninterrupted rhythmic ostinato
(the "obstinate," persistent presence of a rhythmic figure),
shot through with occasional melodic fragments played by various solo
instruments and combinations. The third-movement Intermezzo is also based on a rhythmic ostinato,
interrupted only once by a short, lyrical piano solo. This caricature
of a march includes a middle section (marked dolce, un poco scherzando
["gently, somewhat humorously"] where the piano's arpeggio
and glissando effects provide the background for a little tongue-in-cheek
melody in the woodwinds. The march returns with a section for piano alone.
The full orchestra gradually enters and builds up a tremendous climax
(the high harmonics, a special technique on the violins, in particularly
striking), only to collapse in the lowest register in a sudden pianissimo
that ends the movement the same way the first movement had closed. The Finale (marked Allegro tempestoso) contains a number of contrasting
sections. It starts with a wild rush and irregular rhythmic figures with
wide leaps in both the piano and the orchestral parts. This material then
yields to a slower tempo and a simple tune Nestyev called a Russian lullaby.
However, this "lullaby" soon becomes extremely loud and agitated,
and as the tempo speeds up again, the music reaches a fortissimo
cadence that gives the impression that the piece has ended. It is too
early to applaud, however, for it is now that the pianist attacks his
second breakneck cadenza. The orchestra enters with the lullaby melody
while the piano continues its virtuoso passages. Finally - after a short,
meditative Andante section set over a mysterious tremolo - the first theme
returns with its irregular rhythms and brings the work to an animated
and boisterous close. The violence of the young Prokofiev's quasi-futuristic "slap to the public's taste" was not lost on the critics attending the first performance, at which the composer himself played the solo part. Most journalists could not find words strong enough to condemn what one of them called "a Babel of insane sounds heaped one upon another without any rhyme or reason." Another wrote:
Only one critic, Vyacheslav Karatygin, found praise for Prokofiev's
courage and artistic imagination. He did not hesitate to predict a brilliant
future for the 22-year-old composer: "The public hissed. This means
nothing. Ten years from now it will atone for last night's catcalls by
applauding unanimously a new composer with a European reputation." Karatygin's words proved prophetic: in 1923, the composer, then living in Paris, received his first official invitation to return to Russia, where he was offered a series of concert engagements with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. By that time he had written the Classical Symphony, his Piano Concerto No.3, the ballet Chout and the opera The Love for Three Oranges. And he had had to reconstruct from memory the score of his Second Piano Concerto, which had been lost or destroyed during the civil war following the 1917 revolutions. "I have so completely rewritten the Second Concerto," he wrote to friends in Moscow, "that it might almost be considered the Fourth." Although Prokofiev's first visit to his homeland did not take place until 1927 (he was to settle there permanently in 1936), it is clear that, by 1923, musical circles in the Soviet Union had begun to appreciate a composer who had created such a scandal in Russia ten years earlier. —Peter Laki |
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Set for Theatre Orchestra Charles Edward Ives was born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut,
and died on May 19, 1954, in New York City. Ives assembled and reworked
his Set for Theatre Orchestra in 1914 from several earlier works.
Movement 1 is an orchestration of the song "The Cage" (1906).
Movement 2 is derived from the first movement of the Four Ragtime
Dances (1899-1904) for instrumental ensemble. (The solo piano part
in this movement exists as movement "IIb" of his monumental
First Piano Sonata.) Movement 3 is partly derived from Prelude on
"Eventide" (1899). The first documented performance of this work took place in New York
City on February 16, 1932, by the Pan-American Chamber Orchestra conducted
by Adolph Weiss. The third movement was recorded by Nicholas Slonimsky
and the Pan-American Chamber Orchestra in 1934 and released that year
on New Music Quarterly Recordings (vol. 1/5); that disc contained the
first commercial recording of any of Ives's music. Ives's Set for Theatre Orchestra runs about 8 minutes in performance.
Ives scored it for a theatre orchestra with many possible options for
instrumentation. In addition to various wind combinations, the score includes
high and low bells, timpani or small bass drum, piano (one solo and one
assistant player), optional harp, optional organ, and strings. These are the first Cleveland Orchestra performances of Ives's Set for Theatre Orchestra.
Ives's Set for Theatre Orchestra is an homage to these ensembles and to the music Ives used to play with them. The outer movements are short instrumental songs of a programmatic nature (and to which Ives ascribed specific lyrics); the middle movement is a ragtime fantasy on the raucous music-making of 19th-century American taverns. Virtually every part in the score has one or more alternative instrumentations, and the music is crafted to sound improvisatory throughout. Movement. I: In the Cage In the score, a timpani pattern represents the pacing of the leopard
against which strings repeat a static chord sequence. On top of this accompaniment,
an undulating melody in parallel fourths and fifths is heard. When Ives cast this music as a song for voice and piano, the main melody was given the following programmatic (as well as existential) lyrics:
Movement. II: In the Inn (Potpourri) Throughout the movement Ives paraphrases and extrapolates the melodies of several popular songs of his childhood, including "After the Ball," "Reuben and Rachel," "With His Hands in His Pockets and His Pockets in His Pants," and "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay." Hymn tunes are quoted as well, but in each case they are magically transformed into ragtime music. Among them can be found sharp and angular statements of Bringing in the Sheaves, which punctuate many passages in the movement; mellifluous allusions to Happy Day (a.k.a. "How Dry I Am!"); and a grand statement of Welcome Voice at the movement's close. Movement. III: In the Night The music consists of an ethereal wash of soft, polytonal chord progressions and melodic gestures played by instruments that Ives intended to be spatially separated from the main group Against this accompaniment a Horn plays an extended paraphrase of the minstrel song "De Little Cabins All Am Empty Now." The score includes the lyrics of this song, which are to be mused by the hornist while playing the melody:
As the horn tapers off at the end of its melody, a solo cello intones the hymn tune Eventide ("Abide with Me") while bells outline the refrain from "Massas in De Cold Ground" until the music reaches a quiet and reflective ending. —Thomas Brodhead Thomas Brodhead is an Ives scholar living in Lakewood, OH
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Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op.
93 Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on December 16 or 17, 1770,
and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He wrote his Eighth Symphony during
1811 and 1812, the largest part of it immediately upon completion of the
Seventh Symphony (Op.92) during the summer of 1812. He completed the score
in October while visiting his brother Johann in Linz. (Johann, a pharmacist,
was living with a woman, an arrangement that infuriated the composer,
who went to great lengths in his efforts to disrupt the relationship.
In response, Johann married the woman.) The first performance of the Eighth Symphony was a private one, at
the house of the Archduke Rudolph in Vienna, April 20, 1813. The first
public hearing took place at the Vienna Redoutensaal on February 27, 1814,
together with a repeat performance of the Seventh Symphony and Wellington's
Victory. The first performance in the United States took place on November
16, 1844, with George Loder conducting the New York Philharmonic at the
Apollo Rooms, New York. The Cleveland Orchestra first played Beethoven's Eighth Symphony during
the orchestra's fourth season, in November 1921, with music director Nikolai
Sokoloff conducting. The most recent performances were given by Christoph
von Dohnányi in 1993. In November 1999, Steven Smith conducted
the second movement in Education and Family Concerts at Severance Hall. The Orchestra has recorded this symphony four times: in 1961 with George Szell, in 1975 with Rafael Kubelik, in 1978 with Lorin Maazel, and in 1983 with Christoph von Dohnányi.
We 21st-century listeners hardly need to put one of these masterworks
above the other, recognizing as we do the individuality of every one of
Beethoven's nine symphonies. The individuality of the Eighth lies, to
no small degree, in the combination of humor and seriousness that is peculiar
to this work. Take the first movement, Allegro vivace e con brio. It starts
with a jocular theme whose beginning is played forte by the full
orchestra, the middle piano by the winds, and the end forte
by everyone again. The melody itself could perhaps be characterized as
light, but the vehemence it receives from the orchestration (note especially
the brass and timpani!) makes it sound a lot more serious. The movement
is filled with rhythmic energy; sudden pauses, tonal shifts and mood changes
abound. In the development section, the music becomes highly dramatic,
even violent, for a few seconds before the recapitulation begins in a
triple forte, with the theme in the bass. These moments are anything
but light and humorous; the same is true of most of the lengthy coda (a
kind of musical epilog), where the theme becomes mysterious and full of
suspense, before bursting out in a new double forte explosion. Beethoven first wrote this coda much shorter than it is in the final
version. He later brought back the humor to the ending of the movement
by adding a new fanfare version of the theme that suddenly fades into
pianissimo as the first notes of the melody appear again as a soft-spoken
farewell. According to the well-known story, the second-movement Allegretto
scherzando was inspired by the ticking of the metronome, newly invented
by Beethoven's friend Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. Beethoven used the same
melody in a canon written in 1812 on the words "Ta ta ta ta…lieber,
lieber Mälzel." The charming and witty little piece is not the
first instance Beethoven replaced the slow movement with a quasi-scherzo;
earlier examples include the C-minor string quartet (Op.18, No.4) and
the piano sonata in E-flat major (Op.31, No.3). Scherzos normally take
the place of minuets of earlier times; yet in these cases, as in the Eighth
Symphony, both the Scherzo and the Minuet were retained. The Eighth is
the only Beethoven symphony to have this characteristic. The third movement, Tempo di Minuetto, looks back on the minuets
of old from a certain distance and with noticeable nostalgia. Yet the
graceful minuet-like melody is allowed to appear only after two measures
of heavily accented ostinato (a melodic pattern repeated without
changes). The brass and timpani continue to punctuate the gentle minuet
with seemingly incongruous sforzatos (stressed single notes) that
would more properly belong in a Beethoven scherzo. The recapitulation
of the first theme on the solo bassoon and the triumphant fortissimo
closing figure on the horns and trumpets are also unexpected events that
make this minuet more than an innocent evocation of the 18th century.
The Trio, or middle section, is a dialog between the pair of horns and
the first clarinet over the lively accompaniment of the cellos. It is
interesting that the violins and violas are silent throughout the Trio
except for one short phrase. The finale, Allegro vivace, is the most grandiose of the symphony's
movements. It starts in a whisper on high-pitched instruments only, but
the whole orchestra soon enters in a thundering fortissimo on C-sharp,
a note foreign to the key of F major. The bustling orchestral activity
continues until it is suddenly interrupted by a lyrical second theme that
also starts with a "wrong" note in the key of A-flat major (instead
of the expected C major, which the music only reaches after this elaborate
detour). The development section takes us to many new keys and introduces
the main melody in many new guises, including the famous spot called by
musicologists the "false recapitulation." We hear the main theme
played by the entire orchestra fortissimo; what we don't realize
(unless we have perfect pitch) is that the theme is, once again, not in
the key where it should be. We find out, though, when Beethoven interrupts
the theme with soft, repeated octave leaps on the note E. Then he simply
moves up a half-step to F, a pitch intoned, in repeated octave leaps,
by the first bassoon and the timpani. At this point we know that this
is the home key, and now the real recapitulation begins. The symphony ends with one of Beethoven's longest codas; it is more extended than even that of the first movement and, indeed, takes up almost half of the entire finale. It includes a new subject, a return of the main theme, and repeated emphasis on that off-key C-sharp we heard at the beginning of the movement. In the last minute, when listeners might assume that the journey has reached its end (and the only thing remaining being to confirm the home key), this C-sharp becomes the springboard for a whole passage in the very distant key of F-sharp minor, out of which Beethoven extricates himself with a real master stroke. After a return of the lyrical second theme, and yet another variant of the first one, there is a seemingly unending succession of F-major chords, high and low, soft and loud, and the ultimate joke of the symphony is that we can never be sure when it will be over. —Peter Laki |
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