Bryan Symphony Orchestra

Tickets

Directions and Parking

The Bryan Symphony Orchestra performs all regular subscription and education concerts in Wattenbarger Auditorium, the concert hall of the Bryan Fine Arts Building on the Tennessee Tech University campus. The Bryan Fine Arts Building is located on the corner of 12th Street and North Dixie Avenue in Cookeville.

From Interstate 40, take Exit 286 (Willow Avenue). Turn north on Willow and travel approximately two miles to 12th Street and turn right.

Free parking on concert Sundays is available anywhere on campus. The nearest large parking lots are across Dixie Avenue from the Bryan Fine Arts Building, between Tucker Stadium and the Volpe Library, behind the Roaden University Center and at the former Prescott Middle School, two blocks away on 10th Street.

Concert Events

Crossville Preview Luncheon: 11 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 9, Palace Theater on Main Street. These catered lunch gatherings feature insightful presentations by BSO Music Director Dan Allcott and news and announcements from Executive Director Gail Luna. Reservations required by Monday, Nov. 7; call 931-484-6133.

Music Lovers' Dinner at Mauricio's: Follow up your concert experience with an early Sunday dinner at Mauricio's, a fine-dining experience in Italian cuisine located in a beautifully restored Victorian-style home at 232 North Peachtree Avenue, just a few blocks from the TTU campus. Reservations are necessary; call 931-525-2633.

Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES

November 13, 2011

WEBER: Clarinet Concerto no. 1

TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony no. 4

Among the great composers of the early to late Romantic period, two men rose to prominence not only for the brilliance of their music, but for the fact that they were brilliant at every form of music they set their hand to. The German Carl Maria won Weber and the Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most magnificent symphonies, operas, concertos and songs the world has ever heard.

These men were natural storytellers. In their operas and ballets, they wrote music to illustrate plot and characterization, and they contributed to the written word themselves: both were also music critics for a time. In their lyrical and programmatic compositions, their music speaks of human and divine action … but in their instrumental and purely symphonic music, it’s the music itself that speaks in a language that we, as listeners, interpret with whatever musical background we bring to the experience, as well as the influences of our culture.

CLARINET CONCERTO NO. 1 (1811)

By Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

From the beginning, little Carl was meant for greatness. His father, a musician, believed he could make his otherwise sickly son the next child prodigy – in the style of Mozart – and toward that end, as a youngster, Carl added piano, bass and counterpoint to his studies, as well as singing and composition. As a teenager, he was already writing piano sonatas, string trios, songs and a mass, although only the mass survives. At 17, during a stay in Vienna in 1803, where he studied with Vogler, he began to make his own way in the world; by the following year, he’d been appointed conductor at the municipal theater in Breslau.

Weber traveled constantly, living and working in every major German city, as well as Vienna and Prague, where he was director of the city opera. The scope of his professional appointments and endeavors was huge; he composed, conducted, played piano and wrote music criticism. His intellect was formidable, his craft and artistry in his homeland unrivaled, and success followed. By the time he wrote the opera Der Freischutz, whose 1821 opening in Berlin made Weber became the most acclaimed composer of his time, he was 35 years old. Der Freischutz’s appeal came not just from being a brilliant opera told in German, but being a brilliant opera based on a German story. Weber had liberated opera from the Italians, at least in his homeland.

But before that came his first clarinet concerto – another gem of a piece – which is among the Weber compositions that are still vital parts of the modern orchestra repertory. It’s an energetic, even ecstatic, work that does exactly what it’s intended to do – show off the range and versatility of the clarinet – but in such a way that the orchestra is an equal partner. After the first movement opens with the cellos stating the main theme, the entire orchestra leaps in with an emphatic interruption. The theme resumes – this time from the violins – with a lull that provides a proper opening for the clarinet’s first announcement, a fitting introduction for the protagonist of this work.

There is no program here, no plot or characterization informing the music, and yet the music speaks loudly, clearly; it’s obvious, throughout the three movements, that a drama is unfolding on the concert stage – it’s just one without words.

SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN F MINOR (1878)

By Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was six years old, he could write in French, German and his native Russian. As with Weber, there was no doubt that this child had greatness in him; unlike Weber, however, his potential was revealed differently. While he began piano lessons at age five, outpacing his teacher in reading music in three years, his family didn’t consider music a viable career choice. So he attended the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, and after graduation went to work as a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice; the man who would go on to become second only to Beethoven in today’s orchestral universe was 21 before he began formal music studies.

In some ways, though, toiling away in obscurity could have provided a satisfactory life for Tchaikovsky, who although very social, kept his innermost thoughts to himself, confiding his insecurities and fears in letters to only a few trusted souls. Music forced him onto a stage.

Tchaikovsky bucked against expectations his entire life. After rejecting a government post and graduating from the newly established Moscow Conservatory, he tried his hand as a music teacher, a reasonable career for a musician/composer, but found that working with young people was too intense. He believed he could lead a double life to spare his family the embarrassment of his sexual orientation, marrying a former student who’d threatened suicide if spurned. But he found the relationship too claustrophobic to allow him to continue to write music; he and his wife, Antonina, lived together a scant two months before he was prostrate with nervous exhaustion.

It’s during this timeframe that he wrote the Fourth Symphony, beginning it in May of 1877 before marrying Antonina in July. Following their separation, Tchaikovsky found himself unable to begin any new work, pouring himself instead in finishing the Fourth, as well as another work-in-progress, his opera Eugene Onegin. Both pieces, critics believe, are informed by his angst.

He wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, to whom the Fourth is dedicated, a program illustrating the arc of the symphony, ascribing to its beginning, a fanfare with a motif of fate – of the helplessness of humankind against the hands of something bigger, a divine and implacable force. He wrote von Meck that the motif represented “the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness,” that “there is nothing to be done but to submit to it and lament in vain,” that “all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness,” and that “no haven exists.”

He didn’t mean for the program to be made public, he was answering a question from his great friend and patroness as to the meaning of the symphony. When critics got hold of it, they latched onto it as the gospel, and his music suffered from the reading. They heard the music with preconceptions; had they not, the Fourth might have been understood as the masterpiece it was much sooner.

Today, 133 years later, we have the luxury of hindsight and perspective. With the idea of the composer’s hidden meaning evident, we can experience that fanfare, with its minor chords, as pure despair at the inevitability of human suffering…but there’s also in it, particularly when matched against the final notes of the fourth movement, heroism and triumph – and this from a man who was neither heroic nor triumphant. Without the fate motif, it would be easy to take the finale at face value, as purely celebratory – as if Tchaikovsky has managed to escape fate after all -- and to our modern ears, that would not ring true. We know too much to accept the purely celebratory as genius; we know too much about Tchaikovsky, and perhaps we know too much in general to be charmed by exuberance that isn’t at least slightly tinged with anxiety or fear.

In America, at least, we tend to think first of Tchaikovsky as the writer of our favorite ballets -- The Nutcracker, Swan Lake – and it’s good to remember that he was, indeed, a theatrical composer in addition to his stature as a symphonist. He wasn’t just churning out beautiful music, he knew how to set up a dramatic arc, which is most certainly what the Fourth exhibits, with its bookended motifs – the opening theme repeated at the end.

His final three symphonies are known as his most personal, but of the three, the Fourth is perhaps the least revealing. It launched his mature period, coming as it did at the biggest turning point in his personal life – a period musicologists point to as an unleashing of his creativity, as the moment when he broke free of the constraints of convention and gave us work wholly original in scope and form.

And yet, while the Fourth was influenced by the personal turmoil he faced, he chose a generically human statement to make; he wrote about the implacability of fate, and fate applies to us all, not just one of us individually. So it wasn’t about him, it was a comment about the collective human experience. We see more of Tchaikovsky the man in the Fourth … but it’s the Tchaikovsky he chose to show us – the image he wanted us to see – just as he wanted society to see him as heterosexual to spare his family the stigma of the reverse. The moral of that celebratory finale is, perhaps, that you can survive unhappiness – and perhaps live to find a certain measure of contentment in contributing to something that endures generation after generation.

***

During the 1891-1892 season of the Imperial Russian Music Society, Tchaikovsky conducted the performance of two new pieces, the Overture to Hamlet and Voivode. Mikhail Bukinik, a young player in the orchestra, got a rare glimpse of the maestro. Despite a warm reception by the orchestra, Tchaikovsky was nervous and pale, and looked older than his years, and he wasn’t communicating well with the musicians; the rehearsal was as deeply disappointing for the players as for the composer. Afterward, as the performance was scheduled to begin, wrote Bukinik: “Tchaikovsky’s appearance on stage elicited such a furor that the applause lasted as long as ten minutes, preventing him from beginning. Moreover, flowers began to pour down, enormous bouquets from the balcony, so that the musicians had to protect their instruments from harm. I observed Tchaikovsky during this rapturous ovation. To my surprise, I noticed on his face a kind of sadness, as if he felt sorry for himself.”

Did he fear the audience’s disappointment at what might easily turn out to be an indifferent performance? Expectations were high, and his own had certainly been dashed during rehearsal. Was the unconditional respect of both the musicians and audience more than this very private man could bear?

Weber loosened the hold of Italian opera in Europe. If Weber became known as the father of German opera, then the music of Tchaikovsky became Russia’s official imperial art – and the music of each has lasted well over a century. Only the work of a genius could have that sort of impact. But sometimes personal genius comes with a cost.

-- By Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott