Sounds like: Sun in Portland after rain season

Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) 
Little Suite for Orchestra (1950; rev. 1951) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Michal Nesterowicz led the Oregon Symphony on October 13-15, 2018, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: piccolo, flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 11 minutes  

Witold Lutosławski practiced his art with a levelheaded practicality that he acquired at the onset of his career. He had barely graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory when his dreams of study in France with famed teacher Nadia Boulanger were shattered by the German invasion of Poland. Conscripted into the army, the gifted young musician was captured by the Wehrmacht but managed to escape custody, after which he scraped together a living playing the piano in Warsaw cafés. Those days of hardscrabble, practical music making taught him the value of writing directly to his audience, as witnessed by crowd-pleaser early works such as the two-piano Paganini Variations of 1941. Throughout the distinguished half-century career that was to follow, Lutosławski never lost contact with his intention to create attractive, approachable music, regardless how far his musical idiom was to diverge from its youthful moderation. 

Lutosławski’s Little Suite, an early work from 1950, was inspired by the folk music of the village of Machowa, in eastern Poland not too far from the Slovakian border. One of the most frequently performed works in 1950s Poland, we can understand it as an extended study for the 1954 Concerto for Orchestra, the spectacular orchestral showpiece that put Lutosławski on the international map.  

The suite opens with a Fujarka, which is a long end-blown flute originating in the villages of the Carpathian Mountains. Typically associated with shepherds and pastoral life, the fujarka is much longer than your average flute, sometimes extending as much as five feet. Its sound is throaty and melancholic on the whole, although it also has a vivacious soprano register. In the Little Suite, the fujarka is represented by both piccolo and flute, heard in sweetly lyrical passages alternating with propulsive dance rhythms. 

A Hurra Polka follows, a couples dance punctuated with shouting calls and arm movements, the dancers arrayed in a circle. Next comes a folk song (plosenka in Polish.) It starts out with paired clarinets, adds flute, then oboe, and finally the strings. The Suite ends with a Tanice, or dance. It’s another couples dance, associated with the Lasowiaks of southeastern Poland. 

© Scott Foglesong

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (July 1838–September 1844)

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Guest conductor Gilbert Varga led the Oregon Symphony on April 25 & 27, 2015

Instrumentation: solo violin, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Estimated Duration: 27 minutes

“I would like to write a violin concerto for you next winter,” wrote Felix Mendelssohn to his longtime friend and colleague Ferdinand David in the summer of 1838. “There’s one in E minor in my head, and its opening won’t leave me in peace.” Mendelssohn, then conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, had known David for years. The two prodigies met as teenagers; 15-year-old David was a budding violin virtuoso and 16-year-old Mendelssohn had just completed his Octet for Strings. Years later, when Mendelssohn was appointed director of the Gewandhaus concerts in 1835, he hired David as concertmaster. In 1843, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory and quickly appointed David to the violin faculty.

Mendelssohn had played the violin since childhood, and by all accounts was quite accomplished. However, the E minor Violin Concerto required a level of technical knowledge and skill beyond Mendelssohn’s abilities, so he turned to David for hands-on advice. During the composition of the E minor Concerto, Mendelssohn wrote the melodies and designed the overall structure, while David served as technical consultant. 

In this concerto, the violin is always and indisputably the star, while the orchestra’s role provides what the late music critic Michael Steinberg called “accompaniment, punctuation, scaffolding and a bit of cheerleading.” Music this familiar can be difficult to hear as a “composed” work at all; instead, it seems to emerge sui generis, like Athena bursting fully formed from the head of Zeus. 

In a break with convention, the solo violin rather than the full orchestra opens the Allegro molto appassionato with the main theme. Mendelssohn also defied expectations by placing the first movement cadenza, which David composed, between the development and return of the main theme, rather than at the end of the movement.

A solo bassoon holds the last note of the Allegro and pivots without interruption to the Andante. Here the soloist leads with a lyrical, singing melody full of tender poignancy. The gentle Andante flows almost without pause into the Allegro molto vivace. The exuberant quicksilver theme of the finale contrasts sharply with the intimate Andante, and demands all the soloist’s technical and artistic skill. 

Op. 64 turned out to be Mendelssohn’s last completed orchestral work; he died two years after its premiere. Scholar Thomas Grey observed, “It seems fitting, if fortuitous, that [the Violin Concerto] should combine one of his most serious and personal orchestral movements (the opening Allegro) with a nostalgic return to the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the finale – the world of Mendelssohn’s ‘enchanted youth’ and the music that, more than any other, epitomizes his contribution to the history of music.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 (1806)  

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Gregory Vajda led the Oregon Symphony on February 3-6, 2012, at Bauman Auditorium at George Fox University and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 34 minutes 

The Fourth Symphony, written in 1806, is a product of Beethoven’s “middle period,” a time when he was regularly casting thunderbolts and reshaping Western consciousness about the role of music in society, while establishing the notion of artists as inspired creators who answered to only themselves. But it was also a time for intense personal turmoil in Beethoven’s life – well, more intense than his typical everyday chaos – inasmuch as it involves one of his most tantalizing biographical mysteries: the “Immortal Beloved” of his only known (and undated) love letter. “My heart is full of so many things to say to you,” he rhapsodized, “there are moments when I feel that speech amounts to nothing at all.” That he was head over heels in love with somebody is certain. But who was she? The search for her identity has long been among music history’s hottest potatoes, producing a steamy cottage industry of supposition that never quite seems to cool. Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, Josephine Brunsvik, and Antonie Brentano all have their partisans. The 1994 film “Immortal Beloved” would have it that she was Johanna Reiss Beethoven, the sister-in-law with whom Beethoven battled over the custody of nephew Karl. But in fact her precise identity remains unknown, even if recent discoveries would seem to have tilted things a bit in Josephine Brunsvik’s favor. 

It is an article of faith that the even-numbered Beethoven symphonies are lighter weight than their odd-numbered brethren, particularly numbers 3, 5, 7, and 9. Robert Schumann, surely one of the most perceptive of all writers on music, described Symphony No. 4 as “a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants,” referring to the titanic scope of the Eroica (No. 3) and the driving heroism of the C Minor Fifth. More slender the Fourth may be, but its relative lightness does not imply relative weakness. As Robert Simpson has put it, if the Eroica is a purebred stallion, then the Fourth is a member of the cat family – fast, fleet, powerful, even dangerous. 

In short, the Fourth is no shrinking violet. Haydnesque it most certainly is, but Haydn’s symphonies are often characterized by whiplash tensile strength and greyhound-lean athleticism. Thus it is with the Fourth. After the extended slow introduction – possibly inspired by the exquisite “Chaos” opening of Haydn’s The Creation – the first movement explodes into an exuberant slalom that bristles with high spirits over an underlying current of tension. Occasional references back to the slow introduction impart their sense of mystery (and what’s Beethoven without mystery?) but the overall spirit is a pedal-to-the-metal rush of breathless excitement. 

The Adagio, cast in a leisurely rondo form that interleaves episodes throughout repetitions of the main melody, makes for an about-face contrast. The reprise proper presents an exquisitely sustained theme over a tick-tock accompaniment, befitting Beethoven’s indication of cantabile, or “singing.” The episodes, however, are another matter entirely, sometimes heroic, sometimes verging on brutal, sometimes reaching for a near-operatic grandeur. The movement ends with a series of brief solos from instruments as varied as horn, violin, clarinet, and timpani. 

In third place comes the Scherzo, that supercharged minuet-on-steroids that Beethoven made so uniquely his own. Brilliantly orchestrated and tightly structured, the Scherzo savors as much of chamber music as the symphony with its careful positioning of strings against winds and its sensitive use of the clarinet. Then comes the Allegro ma non troppo, a “perpetuum mobile” affair that, in evoking the propulsiveness and rhythmic virtuosity of Haydn’s symphonic finales, serves as Beethoven’s noble tribute to his celebrated teacher. 

© Scott Foglesong