Erich Korngold: Overture to The Sea Hawk Erich Korngold: Violin concerto in D Major with Philippe Quint Bela Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
Be sure to join us before the concert for our Birthday Bash! Mingle with old friends and new and enjoy heavy hors d'oeveres and birthday cake. Fox Cities PAC doors open at 5:45pm and the party begins! Concert starts at 7:30pm.
Tickets for the Birthday Bash are just $55/each. Call today to reserve your spot. (920)968-0300
Back by popular demand! After a stunning performance of the Red Violin Concerto in May 2010, we invite back to our stage two-time Grammy award nominee violinist Philippe Quint.
He has emerged in recent years as one of the few young soloists to combine a remarkable degree of lyricism, poetry and impeccable virtuosity. He plays on the 1708 "Ruby" Antonio Stradivari violin and appears regularly on international and national stages. “. . . rendered from the intense opening to the furious finale . . . in true virtuoso form, Quint made each difficult run look like a breeze.” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 25, 2010 review of Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D Major.
Music by Academy Award-winning composer, Erich Korngold, opens the program with the swashbuckling Overture to the 1940 film The Sea Hawk starting Errol Flynn. Brian Groner chose this to complement the virtuosic Korngold Violin Concerto performed by a FVSO favorite guest artist, Philippe Quint.
For the FVSO’s 45th anniversary season, Groner will feature several as-yet unperformed works by the FVSO. The first, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, is a tour de force featuring individuals, sections and the full orchestra in one virtuosic “concerto” for the ensemble. It combines classical elements of Western music with folk music from Eastern Europe.
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Orchestra Sponsor: Neuroscience Group of Northeast Wisconsin
Program Notes
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD b. May 29, 1897 d. November 29, 1957 OVERTURE TO “THE SEA HAWK”
You may have never heard Erich Korngold’s name before, but the chances are good that you have not only heard his music, but enjoyed it. That’s because Korngold composed the film scores for a number of classic movies such as The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, King’s Row, The Prince and the Pauper, Anthony Adverse, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. These last two earned him Oscars for best film score.
Korngold didn’t start out as a film composer—in fact, he was a child prodigy in a league with Mozart and Mendelssohn. Korngold was playing piano at age five and composing at six. By age ten he’d written a ballet score, and at thirteen a piano sonata that was premiered by no less than Artur Schnabel. He went on to write several very successful operas that were performed all over the world.
At which point, his life changed entirely.
Korngold came to Hollywood in 1934 to work with Max Reinhardt on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was immediately asked to write music for Captain Blood, and for the next few years he divided his time between Vienna and Hollywood. When the Nazis made it impossible to return to Vienna he moved his family to Hollywood, where he became one of the truly great film composers.
Director Michael Curtiz’ The Sea Hawk was a classic sea-going adventure film starring Brenda Marshall, Claude Rains, and that old sloshbuckler Errol Flynn. It was a huge box office success and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best film score. (Korngold didn’t win—Alfred Newman’s score for Tin Pan Alley won the award that year.)
For his film work Korngold adopted Wagner’s technique of assigning a leitmotiv—a musical motive—to the major characters. These motives interact in a symphonic way, giving the films greater depth and the music greater coherence. That’s one reason why so many of Korngold’s film scores stand up well in the concert hall.
The Overture to The Sea Hawk opens with brass and timpani-led high excitement. When this subsides we hear an expansive central section that is Romantic in both senses of the word: this lush, richly textured music is the love theme for Geoffrey Thorpe (Flynn) and Dońa Maria (Marshall). After these themes reach a moment of tender quietude, the music quickly builds to a brief return of the opening fanfare and the Overture’s adventure comes to an end.
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD b. May 29, 1897 d. November 29, 1957 CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP. 35 FOR VIOLIN & ORCHESTRA
After World War II Korngold began to write concert music again, starting with this Violin Concerto. If it’s hard not to think of the movies when you hear it, there’s a good reason: much of the music is drawn from the scores he wrote for the silver screen. In the first movement the violin enters straight away with a sweet and lyrical theme from Another Dawn. As the movement expands and the solo part becomes more and more showy, the music remains utterly lyrical.
The atmospheric opening of the second movement Romance sets the scene for a gorgeous aria for the soloist; this is music where there is beauty simply for beauty’s sake. The Finale, drawing from The Prince and the Pauper, is a rondo full of the spirit of the dance.
While many classical composers including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Bernstein, and others wrote the occasional movie score without tarnishing their reputations, it was not a two-way street. Once he moved to Hollywood, the critics tended to dismiss Korngold as just another hack film composer. Part of this was sheer prejudice, but another part was that composers of orchestral film scores—to this very day—usually write them in the late-romantic style. That style was “obsolete” even before Korngold wrote his first note. It’s one thing to dabble in films, but it’s quite unforgivable (to the musical elites, that is) for your concert music to persist with a style that dates back to Brahms. Korngold had a hard time getting his works played, or even noticed, once he became a Hollywood success. Music lovers, on the other hand, love music when it’s good no matter what the pedigree of the composer might be—and they, for once, are leading the critics back to Korngold to rediscover the treasures in his work.
BÉLA BARTÓK b. March 25, 1881 d. September 26, 1945 CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA
Bartók’s music is a unique synthesis of compositional techniques: it has the colorful orchestral palette of the Romantics, the contrapuntalism of the Baroque, the harmonic freedom of the “impressionists,” the transparency of the Classical era, the quirky rhythms of Hungarian folk music, and a mastery of musical architecture in a league with Beethoven’s. It is both highly sophisticated and vividly direct, with an instantly recognizable voice.
Bartók fled the Nazis in 1940 and settled into a small apartment in New York City. It was not a happy time. He had always been frail, but now he was suffering recurrent bouts of incapacitating illness. He was, in fact, dying of leukemia. His royalties had been cut off and his illness prevented him from accepting the engagements as a pianist and lecturer that he had hoped would support him and his wife. His friends and admirers tried to help, but Bartók would never accept charity.
Violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner were among those friends and admirers, and compatriots of Bartók’s as well; they approached conductor Serge Koussevitzky to arrange for the Koussevitzky Foundation to commission a work from the ailing composer. Koussevitzky himself visited Bartók in his hospital room, gave him the commission and a $500 check, with $500 more due upon completion. The offer prompted Bartók to work again, and may even have caused his health to improve; he and his wife spent the next summer at Saranac Lake, New York, where Bartók composed the Concerto for Orchestra.
The piece opens with an example of Bartók’s incomparable nachtmusik: dark, eerie, and portentous. The steady eighth-notes in the low strings become faster and more ominous as they drive toward the Allegro vivace, which is, in Bartók’s words, “more or less” a sonata form. The bold interjection by the trombone between the first and second subjects becomes the theme of the fugato in the development.
The second movement is called the “Game of Pairs,” composed in what Bartók calls a “chain” form—a sequence of short unrelated episodes. Each episode features a pair of wind instruments, with each pair locked together in a different interval: the bassoons play in sixths, the oboes in thirds, the clarinets in sevenths, the flutes in fifths, and muted trumpets in biting seconds. A gorgeous brass chorale intervenes, then the game returns.
The Elegia returns to the motives of the first movement’s introduction. Bartók called it a “lugubrious death-song.” Its three themes “constitute the core of the movement, which is enframed by a misty texture of rudimentary motifs.”
The Intermezzo Interrotto is based on folk-like materials—except for the interruption. While Bartók was composing the Concerto, he heard a radio broadcast of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. Some of the themes in that work are repeated interminably, especially one depicting the Nazi advance on Leningrad. Bartók found this tune nearly unbearable, and he parodies the second half of it in the interruption. Mere parody wasn’t enough, though: after the banal tune he has the brasses guffaw and the woodwinds giggle.
The whirlwind Finale returns to a loose sonata form. Its perpetual-motion figures and dance rhythms propel it to a brilliant finish.
A huge number of fascinating musical details live in this piece, impossible to catalog, or even notice, in one hearing. In the first movement’s Allegro, for example, how the second three bars of the violin theme are the first three turned upside-down; how the final chord of the “Game of Pairs” is made up from the notes of all the pairs, still locked together in their original intervals; how the fugato in the Finale is so deftly executed that it is hardly noticed as such; how the overall shape of the work is Bartók’s favorite arch form. These are the elements of craft—the unseen structures that unify the music and make each note seem as if it were inevitable.
Bartók saw the work as “a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement to the life-assertion of the last one.” Biographer Halsey Stevens called it “a great work, one of the greatest produced in this century, not because of the startling originality of its materials, or the novelty of their treatment, but because the problems it poses are broad and vital ones, solved with the utmost logic and conviction.”
