Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47
Dmitri Shostakovich

      Dmitri Shostakovich is without question one of the most important composers of the 20th century. A child of the Russian Revolution, Shostakovich became a national sensation at the age of 19 with the performance of his First Symphony. His fame spread rapidly, and his compositional genius was widely acknowledged. The open atmosphere in the Soviet Union in the 1920s encouraged artistic experiments of every kind, but in the beginning of the 1930s, artistic freedom was massively curtailed by Stalin. In 1934, Shostakovich wrote his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It was a critical success, but in January 1936, Stalin left a performance of the opera in a rage, for the music did not fit into Stalin's propagandistic ideology. A week later, the official party newspaper, Pravda, published an editorial (dictated by Stalin) titled "Muddle Instead of Music" attacking Shostakovich. The editorial contained a warning to Shostakovich - "This is playing at abstruse things, which could end very badly."

Click here for the text of the Pravda article

      Stalin's threat changed Shostakovich's life forever. He kept a packed suitcase at his door, claiming that it was not a matter of "if" he would be arrested, but "when." A newspaper announcement for a concert read, "Today there is a concert by enemy of the people Shostakovich." The constant anticipation of his arrest affected him greatly. For nearly forty years, until his death, Shostakovich saw himself as a hostage, a condemned man.

      Immediately after the publication of the Pravda article, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony, which was about to be premiered, out of fears that it was too somber, and went into seclusion for nearly two years. In the following months he worked on his Fifth Symphony and learned how to wear the public mask that enabled him to survive the Party strictures without sacrificing his artistic integrity. Shostakovich knew that his next work had to please Stalin. The Party wanted heroism, and Shostakovich gave them a heroic symphony.

      The symphony was a resounding success, and Shostakovich regained his popularity with the public, if not his security with the Party. In fact, a party hack gave the symphony the subtitle "A Soviet Artist's Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism." Years later, he wrote in his memoirs, "I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth...It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'" Shostakovich gave the Party heroism, but he himself, and not Stalinism, was the hero. He brilliantly sold the triumph of the individual to the Communists as their own brand of heroism.

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64
Felix Mendelssohn

      The E Minor Violin Concerto is everything one could possibly expect from the composer dubbed by Robert Schumann "the Mozart of the 19th Century." It hovers in a classic balance between lyricism and athleticism, virtuosity and restraint, innovation and tradition. Every aspect of the work seems natural and unforced, but Mendelssohn worked at this naturalness over a six-year period before he wrote all the music out while "on vacation" in 1844.

      On the innovative side, the first movement has two notable features. First, the solo instrument enters immediately with its own delicate, concise melody before the orchestra can come to the fore. Second, the solo cadenza, which is more usually relegated to the end of the movement, is worked into the form as the necessary outcome of the development. Then magically, as the written-out solo subsides in a cloud of extremely rapid arpeggiation, the orchestra re-enters with the first theme it was not allowed to voice at the outset. The concerto is very reminiscent of the young Mendelssohn's string octet and Overture to "A Midsummer's Night Dream." The form is worked out in classical detail, but the expression is pure charm and wit.

The Juneau Symphony's performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto will feature soloist Franz Felkl, winner of the 2008 Solo with Orchestra Competition.

Dances of Galanta
Zoltán Kodály

      The 20th Century Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály is perhaps better known for his work in music education for children and collecting folk songs than he is for his compositions. Along with his life-long friend Béla Bartók, he traveled around rural Hungary collecting music by recording performers on wax cylinders, which one might think of as the beginning of modern ethnomusicology.

      Kodály lived from ages 3 to 10 in Galánta, now a part of Slovakia, where he first heard these wonderful dances and folk songs. "The author spent the most beautiful seven years of his childhood in Galánta. The town band, led by the fiddler Mihók, was famous. But it must have been even more famous a hundred years earlier. Several volumes of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna around the year 1800. One of them lists its source this way: 'from several Gypsies in Galánta.'… May this modest composition serve to continue the old tradition." (Taken from the printed score)

      Commissioned for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the structure of the Dances of Galánta is taken from an old Hungarian form, the verbunkos. This was a military recruiting dance from the 18th century that fell out of use after conscription became common practice in the Hungary. Since then the verbunkos, which is characterized by alternating slow and fast sections, had been taken up by the gypsies and consequently made known to the rest of the western world by composers such as Liszt and Bartók.