Nashua Symphony - Orchestra & Chorus

WEINSTEIN	Chamber Symphony
	Listen to a clip from Chamber Symphony!
BARBER	Violin Concerto, Op. 14
	Irina Muresanu, violin Irina Muresanu's performance is made possible by G.M. Roth Design Remodeling, and by our community of donors through the 2007 Royston Nash Soloist Fund. DONATE NOW!
BEETHOVEN	Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93

Michael Weinstein (b. 1960): Chamber Symphony-2005

I can easily label myself as an unabashed neo-classicist, yearning for the old ways and yet mindful that I am living in the 21st century. An intuitive pull towards referential tonality is balanced by a lot of musical education. Not one to accomplish anything directly or easily I essentially write music that is relatively ‘tonal’ sounding but conceptually incorporates the serial techniques I learned about as a young composer. Tonight you will hear my Chamber Symphony, a work of approximately twenty minutes duration that is very traditional in terms of form and structure. I compose abstract thematic music that uses the typical contrapuntal and developmental techniques associated with the classical style and depending heavily for coherence on pitch connections over musical time. The overall structure is simple: three movements, fast – slow - fast. Rather than keys (since I have been taught that ‘tonality is dead’) I choose pitch centers and these are classically predictable too, E-flat for the first and last movements and B-flat for the second movement. But what makes the music a little unusual, despite the ‘tonal’ sound, is my near constant use of tone rows to generate melodic material. The brush of the full chromatic range of twelve pitches gives me an ability to paint the musical ‘tonal’ canvas either sharply focused (as in mimicking a major scale) or in a blurry ‘impressionistic’ or even dissonant fashion. The first movement has multiple sections that refer to sonata form. The second movement is a tuneful ABA aria. The last movement is an energetic single-minded romp towards the final E-flat, also using sonata form elements. The piano sketch was started in Februrary 2005 and finished by June of that year. The orchestration took approximately a month for each movement.

- Michael Weinstein

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Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, Op. 14-1940

With the exception of a (now-lost) piano concerto the composer wrote at the age of 20, the Violin Concerto was Samuel Barber's first essay in the genre. Unfortunately for the composer, the concerto's birth was marred by meddling and interference on the part of the commissioning parties. Soap tycoon Samuel Fels had offered a substantial fee to Barber to write a work for the young Russian-born violinist Iso Briselli. After seeing the first two movements, Briselli insisted that the finale be a flashy showpiece that would allow him to display his technical prowess. Barber complied, producing a brief moto perpetuo of under four minutes' duration -- less than half as long as either of the other movements. However, Briselli objected to the final movement. According to early accounts, Briselli found the finale, in which the violinist is required to produce near-constant torrents of notes, impossible to play. The violinist later claimed that he objected purely on artistic grounds, and that the movement simply did not fit with the other two. Whatever the reason, Briselli refused to play the piece, and Fels asked Barber to return the advance that he had been paid. Nevertheless, the work (which Barber had come to call his Concerto da Sapone, or "Soap Concerto") was successfully premiered on February 7, 1941, by Albert Spalding and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

It was Michael Steinberg who asked "Does any other violin concerto begin with such immediacy and with so sweet a melody that stretches its delicious unpredictable way along?" Perhaps not, but although the concerto's Allegro is marked by a predominantly lyrical, even verdant, quality, the movement is hardly free of the sometimes melancholic drama typical of the form (as seen in the second and third themes). The characteristically lyrical Andante, which, like so many of Barber's slow movements, possesses a melancholic, elegiac quality, is tinged with a certain mercurial moodiness. The final perpetual-motion Presto is a breathless, nonstop whirlwind that races by in a steady, nearly uninterrupted rhythmic flow illuminated by brilliant flashes of color."

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93

Beethoven conceived his seventh and eighth symphonies during a period of deep unhappiness. In 1811, the 41-year-old composer was facing middle age without ever having been married. Increasingly withdrawn and antisocial because of his worsening deafness and ill health, Beethoven worked on the symphonies into 1812, the year he suffered intensely from parting with the "immortal Beloved" of unknown identity, with whom he had had a brief and passionate affair. In the same year, Beethoven's high-handed and futile attempt to prevent his brother Johann's marriage to a housemaid resulted in the brother's estrangement. Despite these emotional upheavals, he completed Symphony No. 7 in the spring of 1812, and No. 8 in October of the same year. The two symphonies seem a pair of mismatched brothers, with the latter a "tour de force of tight packing," as musicologist Michael Steinberg writes. Where the Seventh is the last of the expansive style Beethoven had been developing during the previous decade, the Eighth has often been seen, by modern listeners as well as Beethoven's contemporaries, as a throwback to the styles of an earlier period. When Beethoven's student Carl Czerny noted that the eighth wasn't as popular as the seventh, Beethoven is said to have replied, "Because the eighth is so much better."

The first movement, Allegro vivace e con brio, is brisk and fiery, with several brief melodies following fast and furiously upon each other. Indeed, it is hard to believe that such a wealth of ideas and exuberance can be contained within such a concise framework. The Allegretto scherzando is a reworking of music Beethoven had written in tribute to Johan Nepomuk Maelzel to imitate Maelzel's most recent invention, the metronome. The winds open the section, playing an even and insistent ostinato of 16th notes that continues throughout most of the movement. The third movement, Tempo di Menuetto, is most likely to blame for the symphony being associated with older styles. Although minuets were common in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven had always used the much faster scherzo form in his previous symphonies. Though he employs the slower minuet form here, Beethoven's minuet is no reserved, stately dance. Instead, it seethes with vital energy, the accents are heavier and the crescendos more insistent, while the melodies still move gracefully.

The final Allegro vivace, takes off at a brilliant speed but quite softly at first, dropping down to a pianissimo marking, until a surprising forte C-sharp in octaves. That C-sharp, so far from the opening key of F major, seems dropped in at random, and it disappears equally quickly. We will not be allowed to forget about it, however, as it returns in the coda, which is itself an extravagant joke: at 236 bars it literally doubles the length of the movement. But having steered us circuitously back into F major, Beethoven has a last bit of fun by banging the tonic F major chord over and over, 45 times!

- Barbara Heninger